We finally got our hands on the retail version of Shift 2: Unleashed and after all the excitement of the pre-launch party last week, I can finally tell you what the PC version of the game is really like.
Shift 2: Unleashed is the 17th installation in the Need for Speed franchise and it is touted as feeling just like real racing. The developers have put a lot of effort into overhauling the physics engine and the level of detail is staggering. Vaughn Gittin Jnr, reigning Formula D “drift” champion, serves as your guide as you race, gain experience, level up and unlock more-and-more difficult races throughout the game.
The first thing I noticed about the game is that it is very pretty. I turned all the graphics up to max and it is extremely life-like. Added to the visual feast, there are a lot of “real-world” sounds which add a great deal of authenticity to the experience.
Although the game was a lot of fun, I felt irritated by a lot of issues right from the beginning. The controls are atrocious. I don’t mean a little bit bad. They are awful. The vehicle either veers wildly at the slightest tap of a turn button, or nothing happens no matter how hard or how often I mashed the button. There is no fine speed control. It’s either full throttle or nothing. At first I thought it was just new-game syndrome and I would adjust to it and everything would be ok. I was wrong. Even after I had turned off all the driver’s aids (except anti-lock braking), and after almost six hours of game play, I was still driving like an idiot. I’d installed every handling upgrade I could afford on my Golf GTi and I still felt like I was trying to steer a Brontosaurus.
The control issues are not limited to the vehicle itself, navigating the menus has to be done with the keyboard, as the mouse clicks do not register properly. If this is a result of the game being ported from another platform in a hurry, it’s very disappointing and it highlights what, for me, is the central problem with the game; it feels like a beta test version. It feels like EA only asked fans to test it and nobody said “Hey, that Vaughn guy is seriously irritating, especially after five hours of listening to him shouting in my ear at the start of every race. Maybe you should let people turn him off?” and “Seriously, cars do not sound like that.”
Because of the games attempt to simulate real racing, the races are grouped into “once-off” and tour stages. This opens up a major flaw in the game. I decided to sell my Golf and upgraded to a Ford Focus, but this car had a performance index too high for the races I had access to. Then I had to go through a Byzantine series of buying and selling to get back to the right class vehicle in the correct performance range. You see, Shift 2 does not allow you to not own a car: you have to always have at least one in your garage. Early on in the game when finances are tight and you are fighting for any margin over the competition, this means buying the cheapest car available – the $5000 Toyota your Gran drives to church on Sundays – then selling your current car, buying the car you want and then selling the cheap car again. Additionally, some races are reserved for certain classes of car – Road Modern vs. Retro Road, for example – and if you don’t own the right kind of car, you can’t participate in that race – which means another set of complicated trades. Worse, this is never properly explained to you.
Despite these gripes, I had fun playing the game, whether or not I will be able to keep coming back is difficult to say. Shift 2: Unleashed is pretty, and there is a great deal of depth to the game, but I am not a hard-core racing game fan. I wan’t to be able to go around fast and have fun and I get the feeling that this game requires a lot more dedication than that.
By Angela Meadon