Last year, after the financial disaster of Need for Speed Undercover, nobody thought that EA would continue this long series of racing games. It seemed like the popular series would be forgotten forever. But EA decided to reevaluate the situation and to bring back Need for Speed series into a new light by introducing the best elements from their former installments. This is how the thirteen Need for Speed game called SHIFT made its debut this month promising a lot but somehow causing a general dispute regarding its true value.

The ones responsible for the new look and feel of Need for Speed: SHIFT are the developers from  Slightly Mad Studios, who helped develop sim-racing masterpieces like GT Legends and GTR 2 together with SimBin Studios. In this way, the street racing style was abandoned, therefore the core of the game being focused this time on the simulation aspect showing the sporty facet of this discipline. Without featuring any puerile story or other cinematic extravaganza, SHIFT puts you immediately at the wheel of a brand new BMW M3 to run a test lap at Brands Hatch Indy. On this lap the game will analyze your driving style and will purpose a scheme of handling settings which can be modified afterwards as you wish.  After you have decided which settings to keep, you will be thrown in the first race using the same car on the same track. Here you will feel the aggressive A.I. which doesn't hesitate to push you away if you stay on its racing line, but also its uncommon behavior of slowing down when it is in front of you. It's like the A.I. is giving you a second chance if you are overtaken by any virtual opponent.

Getting used with the game's handling system can become a little trickier, if not frustrating, as it turns out that the simulation aspect is actually faulted on lower difficulty settings by arcade elements. It is obvious that by activating the handling assistance, the A.I. will take care of the more sensible parameters of the control system, by helping you to brake much easily, by correcting the wrong trajectory of the car, etc. But the car in general tends to slide too much, giving you the impression of losing the control all the time. It's interesting how easily you can get out from these types of situations, due to the forgiving physics system, which stops the pendulum effect of the car immediately.  At the same time when playing the game with an appropriate wheel controller, the travel angle of the controller doesn't match the virtual travel angle as seen in the game, which is a minus when playing in full simulation mode. I felt always a lack of precision while playing with the wheel controller, or even with the gamepad on assist handling level. Not to mention how hard is to handle the car in a drift event. At least the award system in drift events is quite limited and has no special requirements, so a couple of slides, even if not performed in special regions of the tracks, can earn you some extra points in order to help win the events.