Impressions of NFS: Shift?

[Pelu]

Racing in circles.... it feels so cold... is just another racing game in the bunch, where are the cops???? where is that insane pursuit that not even GTA can deliver!!! too bad that undercover suck it badly, and this.. is more for a fan of circling....

 

[thilanliyan]

Just played the demo on hardest setting except with ABS on...and it's not bad, and this is coming from someone who likes more sim-like games. I played with an Xbox360 controller...must be much better with a wheel. Good thing is you can adjust dead zones, sensitivities, etc.

 

[smackababy]

Originally posted by: Qbah

Originally posted by: smackababy
I made it to Tier 3 in about an hour. I think the game gives a good impression of speed. I only have a controller to play on, so I don't really use the cockpit view. I enjoy the game a lot. It reminds me of Forza but the controls are still a bit arcadesque. I did the tutorial and got experienced settings after not playing a racing game for over 6 months. All in all, I am enjoying the game. I haven't started to customize my car just yet, as most of the races you get one to drive.

Tier3 is 80 stars... You get like 3-6 stars a race (if you do all the objectives and finish 1st)... ~15 races in an hour with no restarts? You're good

As for the controls, I tried a few rounds with my pad and it sucks compared to the wheel. There's a significant delay between using the stick and actually turning. It's more precise at tight corners with low speed, but for everything else, especially at high speed, the wheel is so much better it's not even a contest Not to mention the higher tier cars drive so differently... I tried an Invitation Event with a Veyron or another one with a Viper and I just couldn't drive properly... was coming from a BMW 135i Coupe and later from a Nissan 350Z. Hell, my Tier2 Camaro SS feels very different from the Tier1 cars (so much more powerful and there's still two more tiers!). I love this game

EDIT: Actually was a bit hard to go from the Beemer to the Nissan too (Tier1 cars!), both pimped to Tier2 stuff The BMW felt like a battleship, it was glued to the road, but just couldn't really go as fast as I wanted. The Nissan felt like flying - you go too fast in a corner and hello grass

I actually got max stars for all races I entered. I might have to up the difficulty some. As far as handling, the front wheel drive cars really feel like they have floating back ends. Maybe it was the way I was driving, but I was getting some serious sliding at first. I just tried to start the game up and play again, but it crashed my PC on level load. Lame as hell.

EDIT: From what I've been reading, the crack for the game is bad. Sadly, I am having to reinstall and use the disk. Guess DRM bests me again!

 

[thilanliyan]

Is the demo actually a good indication of what the actual game is like?

 

[duragezic]

Originally posted by: reallyscrued
My impressions on the PC:

The Menus suck. Anyone remember NFS3: Hot Pursuit's Menus? Or High Stakes? I would love to see something like that again on the pc.

Cars handle awkwardly. My first gripe is there was a lag between my steering input and when the car would actually steer. Then I found out by putting Steering Assist to 'normal' instead of 'novice' or whatever it was, cut out the crap, but now I've found another issue.

I'm only using a 360 pad at the moment, the default control scheme has the accelerator trigger and the brake trigger as digital buttons instead of analogue. They reason for this is simply because the driver MS released for the pad puts the triggers on the same axis, meaning if you were to use the buttons as analogue, you could not use them at the same time.

For instance: Press R trigger, Z axis goes down, press L trigger, Z axis goes up. Press both at the same time? They cancel each other out. So you have a choice to make: Either use them as digital buttons, or use them as analogue and give up the ability to brake and gas at the same time. This is frustrating, using them as digital buttons means I'm either always hard breaking or hard accelerating.

The game looks beautiful. Interiors are very detailed. If your hood flies off, the engine bay of the car looks as it should.

Levels take forever to load, but I haven't defragged my hard drive in a while so that's probably subjective.

Damage is pretty realistic except for the fact that headlights never break. The whole front of your car can be smashed up; I've ripped the hood off my 135i, the bumper, and the entire front fascia, but the headlight's glass were still intact. After seeing Burnout Paradise crashes where glass goes flying everywhere during a crash, this leaves a lot to be desired.


Playing the game without some AA is disgusting.

7/10 - The game is very fresh, but I can see it getting old very quickly.

Oh, and as others have pointed out, the only thing it really shares with the Need For Speed franchise is its name.

Yeah always thought that was an annoyance with the MS drivers. Check out XBCD360 drivers and utility tool. It's solved the problem you found with pretty much all games I've tried (though I haven't tried NFS Shift).

 

[dguy6789]

Just tried the demo. Game itself is fun and looks good, doesn't look as good as screenshots made it seem. Could definitely have done without the stupid unskippable commercial that you have to watch every time you finish a race or even try to just exit a race.

 

[imported_K3N]

This review is spot on.
http://www.virtualr.net/need-f...shift-review/#comments

 

[ixelion]

Then I found out by putting Steering Assist to 'normal' instead of 'novice' or whatever it was, cut out the crap,

After trying this the controls are much better, I am enjoying the game much more now. The menu still sucks but better get used to it, not going away anytime soon.

Time Trial is the only thing I like, the challenge of mastering car handling is the most fun. The "Aggressive" game modes are utter crap imho.

I would highly recommend anyone using a game pad to disable steering assist and adjust steering acc\brake sensitivity. I twill make a HUGE difference in the driving experience.

 

[shabby]

Originally posted by: MTDEW
3: game as a whole is great, but it does seem odd that its a need for speed title.
To me its like....GREAT GAME....WRONG NAME

Totally agree, this game has nothing in common with the previous nfs games other than the name.

Originally posted by: thilan29
Is the demo actually a good indication of what the actual game is like?

Of course.

 

[MTDEW]

Originally posted by: ixelion

Then I found out by putting Steering Assist to 'normal' instead of 'novice' or whatever it was, cut out the crap,

After trying this the controls are much better, I am enjoying the game much more now. The menu still sucks but better get used to it, not going away anytime soon.

Time Trial is the only thing I like, the challenge of mastering car handling is the most fun. The "Aggressive" game modes are utter crap imho.

I would highly recommend anyone using a game pad to disable steering assist and adjust steering acc\brake sensitivity. I twill make a HUGE difference in the driving experience.

Here are some interesting tweaks that supposedly make the game play way better with an xbox 360 controller/gamepad.
http://forums.xbox.com/1/29123...ShowPost.aspx#29123795

Here's a copy/paste from above link for the lazy.

Steering Dead Zone-15%
Accel Dead Zone-10%
Brake Dead Zone-10%
Steering sensitivity-5%
Acell Sensitivity -5%
Brake sensitivity-5%
Speed steering Sensitivity 100%


On to the 2nd fix:

At the main menu enter CAR GARAGE----> TUNING, press 'Y' to enter quick tuning mode.
Under the heading 'balance' move the slider all the way to OVERSTEER. That's right oversteer. Apparently the developer labeled this slider wrong or its a glitch. Turning the slider to oversteer will actually add understeer.

Now go drive. as you can see the cars are now more comparible to the feeling of Forza2 and RacePro. It may not be as good but it is now close! There was a sim hidden somewhere in all this mess and I may have to take back some to the nasty things I said beforehand

 

[thilanliyan]

Originally posted by: K3N
This review is spot on.
http://www.virtualr.net/need-f...shift-review/#comments

Thanks for that.

 

[nitromullet]

Glad there was a demo for this. I think I'll wait for Forza 3. It's not bad by any means, but I already have plenty of driving games (GRID, DiRT) that don't get as much attention as Forza 2.

Not sure if anyone else noticed this or not, but as an F1 fan I'm used to Spa having the start/finish before La Source (GRID has it there too) instead of between Le Source and Eau Rouge. I see in the aerial shots that Spa does have a starting grid in front of Eau Rouge, is this used for DTM or some other series? http://www.spa-francorchamps.be/en07/circuit/visite.php

 

[smackababy]

So I finally got around to the drift portion of the game and wow it is bad. Seriously, they over complicated it and made it entirely out of fail. Really? My car spins out on a straight away when I'm not turning the wheel? ... I loved drifting in the NFS games and GRID, in fact, I bought this game solely because I thought it would be amazing drifting. I want my money back.

 

[Alienwho]

I'm not all that impressed either. Grid feels more polished all around. Maybe I just don't care about driving around a track either.

 

[thilanliyan]

Originally posted by: smackababy
Really? My car spins out on a straight away when I'm not turning the wheel?

It can if you give it too much throttle.

 

[NoSoup4You]

Huge GRID fan here, I started out hating Shift but after turning on the Pro car settings (all computer assists turned off) I'm now loving this game. I promptly uninstalled GRID, which I own through Steam by the way so I'd have to re-download all 13GB (or whatever) to play it again!, and purchased Shift from GoGamer.com for $35.

This game is good, if you like 'sim-like' games with a healthy dose of arcade fun.

 

[shortylickens]

Demo did not impress me.

Interface: Before you can even get to the damn game you have to sit through about a dozen annoying splash screens, the most angering of which is the EA logo. Reminding me that I'm playing a game from such a crappy publisher is not a good idea. Doing the long, drawn-out splash screen festival on consoles may be cool and leet, but on a computer its just irritating.
Obviously this is a port of a bad console game. Menu is irritating to dig through and get to stuff. Changing settings is a hassle, changing graphics settings is incredibly stupid. You can't pick resolution, AA and refresh rate. You have a generic "Resolution" slider and it automatically changes all settings at once based on where you set the number. Thats so damn annoying its pretty much a deal breaker right there, especially when you see how the graphics look in-game (more on that later).

Gameplay: Modes are limited and not very inspired. Handling is awkward and changing settings for handling is a hassle. Once you get everything tweaked its not too bad. Too much distracting shit on the side of the road and it does not contribute to gameplay at all. I think the programmers were just looking for ways to crank up their billable hours. Whenever you hit something the screen goes black & white and blurs to out-of-focus. While I'm sure a film student in his first year of school would be impressed, its totally unacceptable in a video game, and you cant turn it off.

Graphics: Least important factor in an interactive experience like, say, a video game. But it needs to be noted that while this game doesnt look nearly as good as Grid it does run much more slowly. My Radeon 4890 is more than powerful enough to run Grid maxed out with fluid framerates. This game cannot do the same. In fact it looks like they just ripped off everything from Grid and made it slightly worse so Codemasters wouldnt feel like suing them. Game and menus are basically the same only much worse. Graphics feel awefully similar only dont display quite as nice. And they didnt even bother ripping off the Rewind feature which was actually useful.

I'm not a huge Grid fan. If it hadn't come free with my video card I never would have played it. But its far superior in every way to NFS: Shift. And in the world of race games, Grid isnt even considered to be that great except for graphics and the Rewind feature.

Other than seperating you from your money this game serves no funtion. Theres better stuff out there right now and it wont cost as much, especially if you use STEAM.

 

[topslop1]

Game is pretty good - I actually like the film like quality when you hit something - I'm sure you'd be pretty effed up in real life if you crashed at whatever speed you were doing. Also there is a huuuge thread on ATI/AMD's website about people talking about the performance. ATi is more than likely going to produce a hot fix or driver update to get it running how it should. Be patient and hold on. I know because I'm on a 4890 and I'm using all medium graphic settings.

 

[ImDonly1]

Only annoying thing is you can't quit a race. You have to finish it to exit the game?

 

[Vortex22]

Hmm, not seeing the performance problems other ATI users are having here. I have most things set to high and it's very playable at 1680x1050 4aa on a lowly Radeon 4770 and ancient C2D 6400. It's not smooth as butter, but I'm not expecting it to be on my old system. Maybe those with more powerful hardware aren't seeing any improvement over what I'm getting?

Menus are obviously designed for console use, you can get around them faster with a keyboard than a mouse.

I laughed the first time it auto-braked when approaching a corner quickly... immediately turned it to pro mode after one race. The game is actually pretty good IMO. Probably won't buy, but an enjoyable demo. You can skip everything but the intro splashscreen stuff, no need to watch the track intro videos or the ad that plays after each race.

 

[MTDEW]

Originally posted by: ImDonly1
Only annoying thing is you can't quit a race. You have to finish it to exit the game?

Even more annoying was the beginning of career when you are forced to test and race right off the bat with no ability to go to options to properly setup your wheel.
I ran the test lap and 1st race with a HUGE dead zone using my G25 wheel, simply cuz there was absolutely no option to go to the options for the controls.

Heck it woulda been nice to able to do a quick race to get my wheel dialed in b4 i had to click career.

 

[Qbah]

Originally posted by: ImDonly1
Only annoying thing is you can't quit a race. You have to finish it to exit the game?

What? Scroll down the pause menu and there is a huge QUIT to select... You'll be back at event selection.

As for the controls... you do a test lap and then get your settings, which you can change and do the lap again to see how you like it - you can do that as many times as you like. Also, pause the game, go into controls and you can play with the sensitivity and whatnot too.

And the only thing you can't skip is the 3s EA+NFS logo at start. Everything else is skippable.

Not really getting where people come up with those problems...

 

[Barfo]

Originally posted by: topslop1
Game is pretty good - I actually like the film like quality when you hit something - I'm sure you'd be pretty effed up in real life if you crashed at whatever speed you were doing. Also there is a huuuge thread on ATI/AMD's website about people talking about the performance. ATi is more than likely going to produce a hot fix or driver update to get it running how it should. Be patient and hold on. I know because I'm on a 4890 and I'm using all medium graphic settings.

Can you link to this thread? I could use a performance boost in this game.

 

[Raduque]

Demo doesn't even run right. I was able to run one race on the London track in the M3, but now any time I try to start a race, it CTDs.
I'm going to reinstall it and try again, but the first race I ran, I wasn't really that impressed.

 

[MTDEW]

Originally posted by: Qbah

Originally posted by: ImDonly1
Only annoying thing is you can't quit a race. You have to finish it to exit the game?

What? Scroll down the pause menu and there is a huge QUIT to select... You'll be back at event selection.

As for the controls... you do a test lap and then get your settings, which you can change and do the lap again to see how you like it - you can do that as many times as you like. Also, pause the game, go into controls and you can play with the sensitivity and whatnot too.

And the only thing you can't skip is the 3s EA+NFS logo at start. Everything else is skippable.

Not really getting where people come up with those problems...

Uhhh...those options are available normally, but not during the test lap and first race.
You cannot pause and change the wheel sensitivity settings etc...etc.. during the test lap and first race, only after.
During test lap all you get when pausing is resume/restart/options and the only options are audio and video calibration.

Just start new game with a new profile and you'll see what i mean.

And im assuming ImDonly1 tried to quit during the test lap or first race and didnt see the quit option cuz its not there and maybe assumed its not there during all races afterwards also.(which of course , it is)

Anyway, its a minor annoyance and certainly isnt gamebreaking, since as i stated, i like the game.