Need For Speed Shift Review by MrRASER

Less than a week ago I asked you to submit questions and promised to try to find answers after testing the alpha version of Need For Speed Shift. I received quite a lot of various questions regarding the game's graphics, the car physics model, the damage model, and the level of AI car behavior. Having arrived at the Russian office of Electronic Arts with all your questions, I began testing the game. Unfortunately, I was met with a very raw version of Need For Speed Shift, which had been presented several months earlier at the E3 expo.

So, let's go through everything in order. After watching the beautiful intro cutscenes, I finally got into the game menu, where two tracks and five cars awaited me. One of them, the fictional track "London", ran through the capital of England and had all the properties of a city track: a fairly narrow road surface, many slow corners, and, of course, safety barriers. The second was the real racing track "Autopolis GP", well known to many from Need For Speed ProStreet. True, the difference in graphics is so great that I got the impression that I had never driven on it before.

Then I moved on to choosing cars. As was said earlier, the game divides cars into classes (car tier). The first class was represented by the Wolkswagen Scirocca. The second class - the legendary Ford Shelby GT500. In the third class there was only the Nissan GT-R SpecV(R35). And the last, fourth class was represented by the BMW M3 GT2 and Pagani Zonda R. Besides this there was nothing in the menu and, as I was told later, all settings were set to medium values, that is, the physical model of the car's behavior, the level of opponent AI and damage were configured specifically for the average user.

Many of you are interested in the car physics. From various videos made with the same version of the game, it might have seemed that it was fairly average, and certainly not up to simulator level. But the guys from Slightly Mad Studio clearly made their contribution and even at the medium difficulty level (they promise two more harder ones and one easier) the car physics looks better than in NFS ProStreet or in Grid. Having tried different cars, I can say that their behavior is quite realistic. And if driving the low-powered Wolkswagen is fairly easy, then losing a BMW or a Zonda in a corner is very easy.

As for the graphics: what you see in the screenshots is the real graphics of the game. All details are drawn at the highest level. In the car interiors all displays and mirrors work. The scenery, mechanics, track and crowds of fans along the track look completely real. Not to mention the much-touted smoke effects and the rendering of the cars.

But the most pleasant thing is that all the cars can also be wrecked. The damage model in the game is implemented fantastically: the moment you fly into a wall, your car gets crumpled to a pulp, and the driver makes characteristic sounds of pain. Various parts such as hoods and bumpers will also fly off your car, and with a light touch of an opponent's car you can see beautiful scratches and scuff marks. At the medium game settings that were available in this version, damage affects the car's behavior roughly as in Need For Speed ProStreet.

Many were interested in replays and ghost cars. In the E3 version of the game there are only automatic TV replays after the race finish, without the ability to choose the camera and viewing speed. Saving replays is also not possible, but I suspect that in the full version they can be saved and/or sent to the EA website, since the game has something like a "fast lap", which is not counted if you cut the track even a little.

If we return to the game profile, you will be offered a choice of 10 options for developing your character, which will depend, as you may have guessed, on your driving style. During a race, for various maneuvers you will receive either clean driving points or aggression points.

You can earn clean driving points for the following actions:

perfect launch/perfect gear shift

speed threshold/speed threshold

racing line/moving along the ideal line

clean sector/clean sector

clean overtake/clean overtake

corners master/masterful cornering

And aggression points for such actions:

drafting/drafting

spin opponent/spin out the opponent

KOflip opponent/send into knockout/knock out the opponent

block opponent/blocking the opponent

dirty overtake/dirty overtake

slide/sliding, drifting

trade paint/scratching the opponent's car

Note: this list is not complete and reflects only the reasons for earning experience that I discovered.

If you drive the car mostly carefully, you can earn such names:

Track Master/Sniper/MarksMan/Sharp shooter/Surgeon

track master/sniper/marksman/sharp shooter/surgeon

If your style is mostly aggressive:

Fighter/Scrapper/Wrecker/Roughneck/Terror

fighter/brawler/wrecker/hooligan/terrifying

Many were also interested in the level of opponent AI? The level of behavior of AI opponents is quite hard to assess, to tell the truth, at first I couldn't handle the controls and made mistakes in corners, finishing races in the last places. Then, having gotten used to the controls and learned the tracks, I started winning by about 20-30 seconds. But don't forget that this difficulty level is designed for an ordinary player, not for a world champion. It is also worth noting that AI opponents will try to block you or push you off the track, but at the medium difficulty level their actions didn't seem aggressive enough to me.

Finally, I would like to say that I got a lot of pleasure from the game, and I look forward to the full version.

Author: Mr.RASER
Source: nfs.ru