The first thing you'll do when you turn on Need for Speed: Shift is quickly race a short track. During this, the game gauges your performance and decides which level of difficulty and assistance you'll probably require to enjoy the game. After that race, it'll recommend an AI difficulty setting (easy, medium, or hard) and a handling model (casual, normal, experienced, or pro). From there, you can tweak the settings to your liking. The handling model setting governs the level of automated assistance you'll receive from the game. There are assists for steering and braking, as well as more real-world things like anti-lock brakes, traction control, and stability control. You can also decide if you want damage to impact your car's performance and, of course, you can switch to manual transmission. With everything turned on and set as casually as it gets, the game practically plays itself. The auto-brake slows you down for corners in a pretty conservative way, and all you really need to do is point the nose of your car at the game's dynamic driving line to stay on course. With everything turned off, obviously, the game gets more serious, but even when it's set as seriously as it can get, NFS doesn't quite feel like it matches up too favorably with the heavyweights of the console racing simulation world.
There are also a few cases where the physics just feel off. Take, for example, my fully upgraded Nissan GT-R. For the last segment of the game, you'll be able to race in cars like this one, and with the way I can drive it, it feels like I've smuggled a very fast forklift onto the track. Whenever I rear end another vehicle in the upgraded GT-R, it pops up into the air, letting me drive right underneath it. Obviously, this has a more negative impact when damage is enabled, but it's completely ridiculous and makes the last tier of races easier than they probably should be.
The game is structured into tiers that are filled with different events, like standard races, lap time challenges, drift events, and so on. Each event lets you earn stars based on your performance, and you need more stars to unlock the higher tiers. Each of the four tiers has its own set of cars, though you can buy upgrades to keep lower-tiered cars competitive in the later races. Once you've earned 280 stars, you can take on the final set of races, the NFS Live World Tour. There isn't much to tie the different races together. Unlike previous NFS games, there's no storyline here to keep things moving, and the closest thing you get to a "character" is the British guy who comes over an in-car radio to tell you that a race is about to start before half-heartedly shouting "have fun" as you drive off. The constant reminders to have fun just made me realize that, no, I wasn't really having much fun as I moved from one race track to the next.
Looking at it from the other side doesn't paint a prettier picture. If you don't like simulator-styled racing games, and you happened to enjoy the last few Need for Speed games, there's no slider in Shift that makes it feel like those games. At best, you can make it an easy game, but gliding through all of the races without challenging yourself doesn't make the game any more enjoyable. The game feels like it's stuck between two worlds, and it doesn't execute well enough on either side to fully satisfy any type of racing fan. That said, if you're a fan of racing sims and you're looking for something to tide you over until the next big thing comes along, Shift certainly isn't a bad game. But you'd probably be better off with some older, more serious racing sims.
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