The performance upgrades available for each car are relatively basic, with less options and none of the tuner brand sponsorships seen in past games. Instead, you simply have a more sober choice of generic upgrades in three stages, e.g. Stage 1 Brakes Upgrade, Stage 1 Tyre Package, Stage 2 Engine Upgrade, and so forth. The later stages only become available as you progress through the career mode. Once you have installed all the upgrades available, some vehicles can for an additional cost be "Works Converted" which gives them full race preparation and squeezes out every ounce of performance. Some basic visual upgrades are also available, allowing you to customise your car's paint job, install different alloy rims (from a range of real wheel brands like BBS and Work) and apply vinyl decals. Pimp My Ride and ricer-style rubbish like neons, ridiculous body kits and carbon fibre body panels are all thankfully missing.
SHIFT's Career mode is also relatively basic. You start in Tier 1 with access to a limited selection of events. With each race you have a chance to earn stars; in order to unlock more events and move on to the next tier, you need to earn a specified number of stars. Most races have six stars on offer, three for placings on the podium, two for achieving particular numbers of Driver Profile points (we'll come to that in a moment) and one for a race-specific special objective (such as performing a clean lap, owning 75% of the racing line or holding a drift for 4 seconds). What this means is you can potentially earn stars from a race (and thereby advance your career) even though you finished in last place. Curious.
Even curiouser is the Driver Profile system, a gimmick upon which the game places far too much emphasis. This is where NFS SHIFT's delicate combination of serious racing pretensions and arcade accessibility ambition starts to smell a bit off. While you're racing around the track you pick up Driver Profile points in one of two categories: Precision and Aggression. Precision points are earned for things like sticking to the racing line, making a clean overtake, mastering a corner, doing a perfect launch or achieving a best lap or sector time. Aggression points are earned for things like sliding around corners, doing a dirty overtaking maneuvre, drafting, blocking an opponent or "trading paint". Fill up the points meter at the top of the screen and you start earning double points for a short time. Your points are added up at the end of each race and your totals determine whether you are a "Precise" or "Aggressive" driver on your Driver Profile. The trouble is, Aggression points reward drivers for doing things they shouldn't really be rewarded for. It's incongruous and detracts from the game's otherwise straight-faced approach to motor racing.
And it doesn't stop there either. As you gain more and more Driver Profile points, you level up and gain Driver Levels which reward you with bonus cash and access to Invitational events. These events usually give you a chance to race in a car beyond your current career level.
But that's not all. You also earn "Badges" for things like trading paint (crashing) with a particular number of opponents, or loyalty to Japan, Europe or USA by driving a particular distance in cars from that region, or doing a particular number of perfect launches. Once you've earned all the minor badges of a type, you gain the major badge. These are further split into silver, gold and epic badges. If that all seems a bit pointless, well, it is. It's an orgy of rewards for rewards sake, desperately trying to create extra motivation for you to keep coming back to the game. If you are the sort who obsessively collects all the trophies or achievements in each game you play, you might like it though.
Fortunately, the whole Driver Profile and reward system can be safely ignored if you choose. Putting that aside, the career mode is well paced, and with cash and stars to be earned there's still plenty of motivation to win. With so many tracks on offer, the range of events feels quite varied. As well as straightforward races (either on one track or as a series across multiple tracks, with endurance, manufacturer and driver duel variations), there are also hot lap and time attack events (where you compete to set a best lap time), car battles (where two iconic cars are pitted against each other - such as a Mitsubishi Evo vs. Subaru WRX), eliminator races (where after each lap the last place driver drops out) and drifting events.
I found the drift events initially frustrating, as the objective is the opposite of circuit racing, and the car handling is set up differently. Presumably it's meant to simulate an oiled road surface, but the cars slide so easily it's actually difficult to hold a straight line - simply apply too much throttle and you'll lose the back end. You win by scoring more style points than the AI opponents, and style points are earned by drifting around a corner at the sharpest angle, as close to the clipping point marker and at the highest speed possible. Once I figured out that chucking it up to fourth gear and feathering the throttle enabled me to maintain some control over my Nissan S15, I started winning the events and warmed to them a little, but I still feel they add little to the game and would have been happier not having to slog through them.
The AI opponents in SHIFT are competent drivers who will react to you - not just parade around the track like the zombies in Gran Turismo. Sometimes they make mistakes, braking too late and running off on corners, but mostly they provide a good challenge. The AI difficulty level can be switched between low, medium or high if you find them too hard or too easy.
Once you outgrow the AI opponents you can go online and match wits with fleshy ones. Unfortunately we were not able to test SHIFT's multiplayer functions for this review, but several modes are available: ranked and unranked "Versus" races with up to eight players and a head-to-head Driver Duel ladder mode.
EA has succeeded in jumpstarting Need for Speed back to life with SHIFT. Despite numerous flaws, underneath the confused body work of a game that can't decide if it wants to be a simulation or an arcade racer, there is a solid engine and, most importantly, a fun racing game. It looks fantastic, it sounds great, it's exciting and it drives well. SHIFT may not be quite ready to take on the big boys of the racing world, but it's a great start and will provide a strong foundation for EA and Slightly Mad to build upon.
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