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Need for Speed: Shift (click to resize),

developer: Slightly Mad Studios, publisher: Electronic Arts, platforms: PS3, PSP, PC, Xbox 360, Mobile phone, iPhone OS

After last year’s disastrous instalment Need for Speed: Undercover, the Need for Speed franchise finally experiences a necessary reorientation. Electronic Arts eventually lets go of this outrageous illegal downtown road races and trashy wild hot pursuits with bloody coppers and tune in to some challenging and more simulative approach on motorsports.

Nonetheless it’s a damn pity that real racing game aficionados beyond the NFS age or IQ threshold of 16 years respectively IQ70 will quickly realize that there’s not that much of substance behind the howling engines of uber soaped up HP-muscle cars. Therefore Need for Speed: Shift leaves me relatively deflated an scatterbrained. The game simply fails to present itself as a coherent racing simulator. With its half-baked tuning options, insanely daft AI and its fiddly (drift) controls, it’d just epicly fail against the top dogs like Gran Turismo Prologue or Forza 3. But it’s not even a fun focused arcade racer as there are first and foremost better arcade racers out there. The utter bad thing now is that Need for Speed: Shift even fails in placing itself as fully functional hybrid combining the best features of both worlds realistic true-to-life simulation and rather action-oriented arcade. Yet this would be absolutely obsolete as fierce competitors as Racedriver: Grid already own the target group.

The emerging questions now is why Electronic Arts seems to desperately freaks out and release such a bland, alarmingly uninspired, as regards of content inconsequent and from a technical point of view not up to date product on the hotly contested market for racing games? I rather drive my all geared up GT and kiss the next best alleytree. This would at least have some impact on me… I think.

Need for Speed: Shift - Trailer