Where do I begin? I don’t race, as Mitch Hedberg so eloquently puts it, if my car won’t start and the gas guage doesn’t say E, I’m screwed.  You can imagine I dont play many racers, and NFS Shift was one that I sat down to with a lot of doubts.

This game has idiot proofing which I need, and I liked. The first thing you do in your career, is  a “practice lap” aka can this idiot drive lap. And after physically destroying the loaner BMW they gave me, all of my settings were put to retard.. I mean easy. I’m not sure if I crashed more because the cars looked so good that I got distracted, or because the different engines passing me kept surprising me. Every car that passed me that was a different make and model sounded completely different. After an hour of racing I received an invite to the Lotus Elise test event… Sadly the girlfriend stole the controller and did the race for me, giving me time to admire the car, and the fact that it sounded just like the damned Elise that passes me every day when I’m headed to work. EA and Slightly Mad Studios have the aesthetics down to a T.

Lotus Elise In Game

The story was simple enough, get to the giant race at the end and win. I can do that, I can try for that, and the experience system tied into the trophy/achievement system made the game very interesting. I was following a minimalist story with no character to care about, yet I still felt compelled to win each race and increase my agression and precision scores to gain that driver level.
Now aesthetics and drive aside, NFS Shift still felt like every other racing game, and Need For Speed game for that matter, that I’d every played. Nothing really set it apart in my head from any other game. Visually it was stunning, Audibly it was fantastic, ( minus a lack of soundtrack) and it dumbed itself down so that an idiot like me could play. Unfortunately after that had passed, I was still just driving in circles at an incredibly fast rate. And trying to gain points for doing cool stuff, so their motto was definitely if it’s not broke don’t fix it, just add to it, and give it a high replay value. And I gotta say they succeeded.

• Audio – 8
• Graphics – 9
• Controls – 8
• Story – 6
• Overall – 7.5