Sum and Substance:

Thumbs Up:

Fresh new look, story driven plots are ditched and you just get on the track and start racing, great crisp graphics, authentic car sounds.

Thumbs Down:

You get too much money for winning races which let you purchase a lot of things, this makes the game look a bit too easy. The tiers are also unlocked quite easily.

Inside the Trunk:

Genre- Racing
Platform- PSP\PS3\XBOX 360\PC
Developer- Slightly Mad Studios
Distributor Milestone- Interactive
Recommended System Requirements for PC – Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz or AMD 64 X2 2 GHz, 2GB of RAM (3GB for Vista), Graphic card with 512MB of RAM support for Pixel Shader 3 (PCI-Ex), Sound Card compatible with DirectX 9.0c, 10GB free hard disk space, Windows XP SP3 or Vista SP1, 8x DVD drive

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

We all know that has been going down hill of late and last installments like Black edition and Prostreet were like final nails in the coffin. Die hard NFS enthusiasts are turning towards titles like Gran Turismo. But Need for Speed are back with Shift which has drastic changes made to its game engine.

The developers have ditched the story interface that we have been playing since Underground and now you get a shut-up-and-race environment. Yes! The good old race track days are back and this time they have even more eye candy.

In Shift, you are a guy who keeps racing to climb up the ladder and eventually wins the World Tour. We don’t know how you will take abrupt end of story type theme that NFS has been having but we certainly liked these new look.

In the first race, you get to choose the difficulty level which will remain the same throughout the game. But you can change it if you are not happy with the default settings that come. You earn money when you win races and you can splash all of it on your car to increase the eye candy quotient of your vehicle. But you will feel this is a bit over done, when you win something you are showered with lots of money, even with the difficultly level set to easiest. This makes you think the game is a bit too easy.

You will make all the money that you want from winning the race and spend it to make your darling car more attractive but mostly the new races in the game have their own cars which makes you feel like a loser for splashing so much money on your previous vehicle. When you are on the brink of finishing a tier, the second and the third tier get automatically unlocked which again feels like a too much of an easy game. There is a new feature called Precision/Aggressive driving style which we thought was quite useless.

But on the brighter side we will again say that the fresh new graphics engine which says ‘no story and just get out and drive’ was welcome. There is a Career Mode which has eliminator races, regular races, drift modes, time trials, etc. There is also a brand new never before seen mode called Driver duels. We found this really nail biting, you can lock horns with a single car or two cars at a time to finish first.

We also liked the sleek and flashy menus, authentic car sounds and gorgeous visuals. The cockpit view is again really eye catching, you really feel the urgency and panic when you crash the car while in a race.

Nitty Gritty:

Shift is the best title that NFS has come up with in a long time. Though it has its own shortcomings, this one feels like a desperate attempt to regain the glorious days once again. We really liked the new look of the series, pick this one up even if you are not a NFS fan but like racing games.

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