NFS SHIFT REVIEW (PC) Posted by The_PC_Gamer on Sep 27, 2009 22:14 (340 days ago) |
A big part of Shift gameplay is, of course, the cars. There is a huge selection of vehicles across all tiers for you, each with a different initial rating and upgrade options. When you buy a vehicle, it is added to your garage and you are free to customize it. Visual customization is limited to vehicle and rims coloring, and adding vinyls to your car. It’s the usual options that fans of the NFS series have come to expect. However, visual customization is rather limited – you can’t choose specific parts of your body kit, install a new spoiler, mirrors or headlights. More importantly though, you are also able to customize the performance parts of your vehicle. There are 3 categories of performance upgrades for all cars: common parts (3 tiers of them), aerodynamics (visual upgrades such as body kits) and Race parts (such as custom exhaust, suspension). The biggest boost to your car will obviously be the common parts, which significantly increase your stats in various attributes. These are linked to your car tier unlocks, so you cannot apply level 2 parts to your tier 1 car until you’ve unlocked tier 2 in career mode. Cars are also limited in what they can do – not all cars can participate in drift, be Works converted, or use Nitrous. The Works convert is difficult to obtain, it requires that you purchase all possible upgrades for your car, at which point your car can be converted by a heavy price to receive a huge stat boost and be able to take on cars from much higher tiers. In addition to visual and performance customization, you can also tune your car to your preference. There are two options here – basic and advanced tuning. In basic, you have options similar to previous NFS titles, such as a slider for soft/stiff suspension, steering weight adjustments, etc. However, if you are more into the sim side of things, you can go into advanced settings where each category from basic tuning has tons more options and no “overall” slider. Some advanced tuning is even locked until you purchase a required part upgrade. This is more in line with the sim titles like GTR2, and will appeal to those fans. However, it’s arguable exactly how much difference, if any at all, this contributes to the gameplay since.
The game also comes with a solid online experience. There are tons of leaderboards for each track, and even a corner for each track – you can instantly see if you hold the record for mastering a corner or if your friend has taken it better. Duel mode offers quick one-on-one races with three stages, similarly to career mode. Versus mode allows for the usual lobby setup and race with up to 16 drivers. Here, the game touts that it will use the player’s career mode results and place them with either Precision or Aggression drivers, so that one does not annoy the other. However, as I said before, I don’t think this feature is very well balanced, so during my playthrough I saw very few Aggression drivers, and those guys were simply playing bumper cars with no intent of crossing the finish line. Also the online play is the first time I encountered the “Rivals” feature, which calculates what drivers you are enemies with and awards additional points for finishing ahead of them. I really did not see this feature appear anywhere during single player, and there was honestly no interaction at all with other AI drivers – just names on the scoreboard. At least online, you can chat with others and really get some competition going.
Technically, the game is very polished. The cars look extremely detailed, and you can even watch your car change as you install new performance parts. The tracks you find in the game are very detailed and life-like as well, since the developer focused on real tracks and brought them into the game. This means that if you’ve played NFS ProStreet, Race07 or even Grid, you will see some tracks here that you already know. Non the less, they are detailed and true to real life counterparts. There are also some people on the track before the race, but it’s the same models every time. The sideline viewers are largely forgettable and poorly detailed, but you won’t be seeing them very often due to the speeds you’re driving at. One glaring graphical problem is your rear view mirror – no matter the graphical settings (I ran the game maxed), you will watch all textures in the rear view mirror blatantly disappear, leaving only the road, sky, and nearby opponents. It’s ugly to see and takes you right out of the game realism. There is also some screen tearing that will sometimes make you feel as though the game drops below 30FPS, but in reality it is not. Otherwise, there are no major graphical issues.
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Oct 3, 2009 13:28:19 (335 days ago)
