back to article Need for Speed: Shift 2 Unleashed

Just how can a new racing game carve out a niche in a saturated genre? How can you improve on the intensity of Race Driver Grid, the visuals of F1 2010, or the driving physics of Gran Turismo 5 and Forza 3? Need for Speed: Shift 2 Unleashed Pretty straight forward Need for Speed: Shift 2 Unleashed seeks to answer those …

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  1. Miek
    FAIL

    A title is required

    If this new one is anything like the original Shift, it will be a total flop. I gave Shift a try and found it virtually un-playable. For me the shift from the arcade handling of Most Wanted and Undercover to the "we copied GT5" handling in Shift ruined this game series.

  2. Jefe Mixtli
    FAIL

    Is there any %#$@ DRIFTING?!?

    I put the original Shift away WAY too soon. Why? The stupid drifting challenges I had to finish to advance in the game.

    I buy a racing game to RACE, not to spends hours over-revving engines and sliding around like a jackass. Put drifting in it's own game. I have no interest in it!

  3. Eradicate all BB entrants

    Meh, you guys suck at driving games

    Having played NFS since the original road & track on the 3DO it seems that the NFS series is in its 3rd nadir (The other 2 being the original and Underground 2). I found the original shift had the right balance between arcade/simulation which you could affect by your driving style.

    Yes the drifting sucks (why is it nowhere near as good as Underground 2?) but I have managed to get to world tour without completing more than a couple of the events.

    As for a comparison against GT5 .... well nothing will ever be as good will it? Even if GT6 featured a lego car on a roundabout it would still be lorded as the greatest ever, except to my brother, a huge GT fan since the first, played the 5th ...... and started spitting at his PS3 in disgust (GT5 was the only reason he bought one)

    Anyway back to Shift ...... NFS has never been a sim, it's intended to be fun and both myself and my 9 year old son love it.

  4. Miek

    I no suck at driving games!

    "Anyway back to Shift ...... NFS has never been a sim, it's intended to be fun and both myself and my 9 year old son love it."

    I found whilst playing the first SHIFT that it was like someone had removed all the fun from the game and was actively punishing anyone who tried to have any fun. I got SHIFT with my PS3 bundle and me and my two mates were sorely disappointed when we tried to play it, I eventually gave it SHIFT to someone else. I've loved the NFS series purely for the fun factor. The move towards a SIM style game has entered NFS into the same market as a Top SIM driving series.

  5. Zest
    FAIL

    Worst Racing Game I have played recently

    I actually enjoyed Shift 1 because it was fun and the presentation was great. So I went to get Shift 2 and was massively disappointed. The steering function of the game lags badly on my PS3 and even after spending some time on the setting cannot seem to get the handling right. This is so different from other racing games that I have played which provides users with usable default settings to get things going at the beginning. The silly game creators actually set the tyre pressure to 50 psi as the default, ensuring that your car handles like a crazed shopping cart.

    A quick check in the internet forums reveals that a lot of people are facing the same problems with the steering functions especially those with PS3s.

    The graphics looks bad and there is this annoying Formula D dude who says very silly things during a race. Really missed the race engineer guy from Shift 1. Lets see if EA will release a game patch soon or I may just ditch this trash on ebay.

  6. Joe Blogs

    NFS 3D

    Have they sorted out the 3D that was very bad in the other NFS games?

  7. hexx

    nah, no title needed

    I finished first Shift and am roughly 50% in Shift 2 and I simply don't see what others are complaining about. I use Logitech DrivingForce GT and I find handling OK (different from GT5 of course). Yes it is more arcade than GT5 but you have a bit more fun here than in GT5. If you find handling hard you must really suck in racing games :D. I play both, Shift and GT5. GT5's collisions are utter joke but the handling (feel of suspension and force feedback) are better than in Shift(2). These two games are different, not the same kind. If you're into racing and are prepared to be frustrated then GT5 is for you. If you want to have more fun, try Shift 2. As simple as that.

  8. davew_uk
    Thumb Down

    Growing on me

    When I first played this you could hardly say it was love at first sight, but with time and effort it is starting to grow on me. It's good-looking and enjoyable, but the handling is flawed far more I think than the review suggests. After an hour on Shift 2 its such a relief to go back to almost any other driving game where you don't have to wrestle the wheel into submission just to get around the track.

  9. Coward for a reason!
    Thumb Down

    Terrible game

    I bought it for pc and really wish I hadnt, I tried and tried to like it but the handling is absolutely terrible and nothing fixes it, it has been uninstalled and thrown in a box now, 75%? no chance.

    Don't touch it, read user reviews not journalistic ones, its one of the worst games in the NFS series, it tries so hard not to be an arcade game and more of a sim in terms of handling and fails miserably, it's just no fun to play.....

  10. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    No helmet cans, please. Thank you.

    "helmet-cam turns to follow the driving line." GEBUZ ALMIGHTY NO. Please no, have mercy.

    At the infancy of racing games, Microsoft tried to do a racing game (googling result is Microsoft CART Precision Racing), that had that same "feature". It made the driving so dizzy, and hard to focus, that it gave me headaches.

    The cam would turn so badly that it wouldn't show the "windshield" anymore. Ops. Is that the gearbox of the car in front of you, or are you front spoilers happy to meet my helmet?

    Lo and behold, somebody tried to pull that off 20 YEARS LATER. Even in the tiny screenshot provided here, thank you, but no thank you.

    Intelligent AI? HOW ABOUT RUBBER-BAND AI? In the Most Wanted series, even if you could outrun, out-turn, and outwit the crap of the AI, there they were whizzing by you on the next corner after you nicked an oncoming car, when you had clearly opened some, say, 200 meters ahead of them.

    That was most glaring when (ahem, in the purpose of research) you cheated the hell out of the game with trainers. You could enable infinite boost, infinite slow motion, and there were the AI cars one corner behind you, even when they clearly couldn't have infinite boost as well. Or could they?

    So I found out that you should upgrade only suspension, tires and brakes; everything that help you corner. Provided you don't hit anything, you are bound to win every race. However, you can't do that for very long, because the cops need to be rammed, and you can only do that with plenty horsepower.

    Not even cheating helped the game, so I dumped it in a drawer. Yes, MW is fun at first, but then the AI starts to annoy you with its infallibility. To prove my point I ran all the timed courses, and the AI just broke her own record of the track just to keep up with me while I was not cheating, and did it again when I cheated heavily. Consistency FAIL.

    Of all the games mentioned here, I liked NFSU2 with its full Arcade approach to handling that responds very well to gamepads, and the classic Gran Turismo 2 in the original PSX that was pretty unforgivable, but it was fair regarding the AI behaviour and theoretical lap record for each course, and you had to actually learn cornering, braking, and following the line in any course.

  11. Captain Obvious
    Joke

    Well you know....

    Shift happens!

  12. Heff
    FAIL

    please stop with this

    stop putting out game reviews on a site that primarily caters to PC users when you dont test the game on a PC unit. Shift 2s predecessor suffered from ATROCIOUS analog-input-to-PC control conversion and was unplayable unless you had some sort of derpstick-equipped controller or a wheel.

    same crap with the deadspace review. If I wanted to read console reviews I'd go to every other games hub on the net that doesnt seem to think PC gaming still exists : you know, IGN, Gamefaqs, 1up, etc etc etc.

    you're writing for a PC-portal. review the PC version. End of Discussion.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Coat

      What?

      I played NFSU2 on the PC. Never played it on the PS2.

      I played NFMW on the PC too. Again, far from PS2.

      Along with NFSU1, that used the same streets over and over.

      I don't even own a PS2.

      Ohhh, yes, there is a PS2 version of those. Silly me. So does Half-Life 2 which is famous for the PC version and HALO Combat Evolved which is better know on the Xbox, not on the PC. All cost 1/3 for PC btw.

      And I used a gamepad without analog sticks to play on the 3 driving games. The digital steering was so much more accurate than analog thumbsticks. I tried steering wheels on stores with demos of PS2. Indeed, they were atrocious, on the exact opposite of your affirmation.

      Only the GT2 version I actually played on a PSX (er PSONE, actually) , I now game on PC only.

      Now the discussion ended.

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