This game can actually be pretty good, if you use some of the mods made by its great modding community.
Ok, I like my driving games, I own a G25 racing wheel and I like to play racing games on max-realism, no assists and all that. But the handling in Need for Speed Shift was appalling. Nearly every car above hatch backs feels as though the axles are too long for the wheels, so as you drive along the wheels are able to slide up and down the axles. The whole thing has this feeling of absolute instability. Driving along at not very high speeds feels like you have very little control over the car - the back steps out at the slightest hint of throttle, like the rear wheels are made of ice. Also, the sound effects are a bit rubbish. The makers of the game seem to say "racing games like Gran Turismo or Forza, they all have such subdued, realistic sounding engines. I think that's boring. Every car should sound like a 1000hp V8, that'll make it more exciting!". It doesn't. It's just plain ridiculous.
So I sold it pretty quickly and never looked back. But a few weeks ago I thought "what about the pc version? There must be some mods for that on the internet". So I picked up a PC version for little over £10 and modded it up a bit. For anyone looking to do the same, these are the main ones I got:
- Sharp Tyres Mod - this is absolutely essential to get rid of that appalling handling. It pretty much changes how the game feels, and makes such an improvement.
- Career mod - I forgot to mention, you progress far too quickly and easily through the career and get too much money. This mod doubles the requirements to unlock events and new tiers, doubles the number of laps in races and halves the prize money from events. It's really good for making the game feel better balanced.
- factory colours mod - this mod makes the game stop using the rubbish looking liveries and instead makes all the cars in the game have single colour paint jobs. It looks so much more professional since it basically just makes it look more like GT or Forza.
So with these mods, courtesy of Shift's great modding community, this game is actually pretty good. The driving is pretty good, that sharp tyres mod really does the trick. Although modifying cars ruins the handling, and some of the most powerful cars in the game are so wayward that not even the mod can fix their terrible handling. But at least now only 10% of the game is rubbish, not 100%.
There are still some issues that modding unfortunately can't seem to fix. As I mentioned earlier, the sound is hopeless. There are also a lot of bugs in the PC version. I'm not sure if these are brought about by the mods, but either way about 5% of the events don't work and just lead to the game crashing. But the worst problem which, as far as I'm aware, is unfixable, is the AI. It is unbelievably aggressive. I think the designers thought "lots of driving games have AI which just sits there and races cars. Ours should be suicidal maniacs". The AI is just so ruthlessly aggressive. If you are in front of them and they're going faster they will just smack into the back of your car. If you're diving side by side they will often push into you. If you pass by them cleanly they will nearly always tap your back end, leading you to get a "dirty overtake" aggressive points bonus instead of the nice precision points bonus that you deserved, and if you're unlucky lead to you spinning out.
But there is some good fun racing to get out of this game. Don't expect high quality, but since the game is so cheap now, it still ends up being quite a bargain. All courtesy of a few talented modders.