The past few games in the Need For Speed franchise haven’t impressed fans and critics alike, and EA is looking to make up for it with NFS Shift. This time, it’s a rather competent racing developer that’s “behind the wheel”, so to say; they were the ones behind the very competent racers GTR 2 and GT Legends, so it’s no surprise they were given the task of rebooting one of the longest running racing franchises in gaming.

Need For Speed Shift is the 13th Need For Speed game, and it appears that this time, the developers were looking to just get it right, not re-invent the wheel (pardon the pun). The career mode begins by throwing you on a track alone in a BMW, in order to test your skills (the game adapts the difficulty when you complete the track). While that’s a great idea, it’s frightful when you’re driving the first time, the controls are all over the place and you feel like quitting before even completing the first lap. Suffice to say, the first impression is rather bad. After fiddling with the setting and learning to proper handle the cars, it gets better, but we would have expected a better learning curve from such experienced racing developers.

The career mode includes 150 racing events, but you’re not forced to complete all of them before advancing to the grand tour, which kinda feels like a short cut. During each race, you get stars (points), not only for finishing, but for stuff like achieving the highest speed, or going through corners the right way or causing your opponents to spin or crash. It means that even if you don’t finish first, you can still accumulate enough to advance. The opponent AI is very aggressive, even on the easiest difficulty, and will often ram you and spin you off track, even if it doesn’t always seem like the most realistic thing to do. One thing the game excels at, is the sense of speed when you’re driving. The faster you go, everything seems more and more frantic, especially if you’re inside the driver cockpit.

The game is trying to be both a simulator and arcade racer at the same time — the controls are tight and every little mistake is punished, yet you’re encouraged to force your opponents to crash and to do slides and drifts, which, at least with the default setting, will almost always go wrong. It’s in the middle between simulation and arcade, it’s got the worse of both worlds. The game support 8 player online multiplayer, and here it’s even more confusing, as it always seems as the main objective for everyone is to just ram into each other get get points that way. I had a difficult time completing one single online race where everyone acted somewhat “decent”.

Technically, the game isn’t the best looking; the cars aren’t that detailed and the selection of cars isn’t that big to begin with. The tracks on the other hand, look great and are aplenty of. The online mode ran smooth, even though the experience wasn’t that great. If you long for a great driving game this holiday season, we’d recommend Dirt 2 over NFS Shift any day, but if you’re an NFS junkie, it’s still worth it.

The Good:
Great sense of speed
Lots of detailed tracks

The Bad:
Steep learning curve
Not that many cars
Unrealistic opponent AI

Overall score: 6/10