Need for Speed - SuperCheats Top Five of the Game Series

Four: Need for Speed: Shift

Considering that our first choice above was Carbon, you might be thinking that a return to the roots of the NFS series would at least be part of the natural selection process for picking the next game to make our list... Or you might be thinking that we have some unnatural fascination with games in the series that appear to challenge the very premise of the NFS games and cannon?

The simple answer is that none of that applies.

Oh sure, Shift does indeed (like Carbon) fly in the face of the established cannon for the NFS series, but that had nothing to do with our choosing it as the next in our list of the Top Five of the Game Series.

What locked it in as our second choice has more to do with what Shift brings to the table in terms of entertainment and the sheer joy of racing than any other factors.

Developed by Slightly Mad Studios and released as part of the traditional September Game Season-launch for the 2009 Game Season, NFS: Shift once again took series fans down a radically different road.

This time though, the route offered less controversy and more surprise than before, in that it offered gamers a take on the sort of legal racing one actually finds in real-life, that being the organized circuit racing that can be found world-wide.

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While this is a new focus specifically for the series, the choice of a mixture of exotics, muscle cars, and the Supercars that cost more to insure than most cars cost off the dealer floor is certainly in keeping with the very essence of the spirit of Need for Speed.

Shift sports more than 60 very desirable cars divided into rated tiers (four of them) and offers the player 19 unique track environments upon which to race.

Now hold on, I know you are thinking, 'Oi! We already have Forza and GT, why would we need an NFS version of those?!'

The simple answer is we don't.

The good news is that NFS: Shift is not what it probably sounds like, and to better understand why that is, it helps to fully appreciate the approach that each dev team for the NFS games take with each new title.

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While the Need for Speed series may have started out as an homage to real-world racing, with a focus on the physics and experience of racing, once it found its voice and truly grasped its purpose in the gaming world, it naturally gravitated towards the fusion of real-world and arcade-style racing for which it is justifiably famous.

That makes the premise in Shift a lot easier to understand -- particularly its take on the real-world circuit racing sport.

It is obvious from the start that what the development team intended was to take on circuit racing with a decidedly NFS-bent to it. That element stands out when you remember that only some of the tracks in the game are actually licensed tracks with realistic depictions of their racing environments.

Most of the other tracks are actually creations that are far outside of the strictly regulation type of racing environments one finds in professional racing simulations -- rather they have been imagined and created with an eye towards entertainment and the driving experience that can be had on them in place of the uber-realism that is usually found in such games.

Naturally, this being a game that is legitimately part of the Need for Speed series, these imaginary tracks are packed with challenges and surprises of the type that has traditionally made NFS a favored racing series in the first place.

Since every NFS title has to have some unique element that makes it, well, unique, whenever a new game is launched for the series -- and particularly in cases like this, where the basic story and premise are different from what we have grown to anticipate, it is only natural that we begin our first approach by looking for what is different and for what stands out as potentially the ornament that makes this game unique.

How You Look at It?

For Shift this turned out to be more than a simple hook or a different perspective -- in fact it resolved into a collection of differences, beginning with the return to the inside-cockpit-racing-view that was last encountered in Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed, which is arguably a title that can reasonably be considered outside the main series.

While we freely admit that at first we didn't like or appreciate that POV, it turned out that -- as is often the case with the NFS games -- it was an element that would quickly grow on the player.

We should also confess -- in the interest of full-transparency -- that the view from behind the wheel easily and quickly grows on you; by the third race you cannot remember why you did not like it. By the sixth race you find yourself wondering how you could have been so mental as to complain about the view in the first place!

The actual driving in the game is something to write home about -- starting with the clever system that they devised to tailor the challenge level to something just a smidgen beyond your basic capabilities -- and then there are the cars....

You Call that a Garage?

While the base retail boxed edition has a nice selection of very fast and exotic cars, gamers who had the presence of mind to purchase Need for Speed: Shift SE (the Special Edition) actually received the BMW M3 GT2 that was featured on the cover of the game (actually what they received was a specially-tuned version of that car but still), they did very well in going for the SE version without even having to think about it.

Along with the tuned M3 SE gamers also received a special track for the Elite Series races -- and the pair of car-expanding DLC Packs which we are going to cover in a moment -- and we should not have to tell you why that is a good thing!

The cars -- or the expanded selection of cars is probably a more accurate label -- also feature heavily in the limited game expansion that Shift received via its DLC, with the first two consisting of a Ferrari Pack and an Exotic Racing Pack.

The Ferrari Pack offered players 10 unique models of Ferrari, and sported an additional 46 challenges for the game that applied specifically to those Ferrari.

The Ferrari Pack was also an Xbox 360 exclusive, and if you did not buy the SE boxed game, you have to pay 800 MSP to obtain it.

The second DLC car-expansion was the Exotic Racing Pack, which offered players a very nice collection of cars -- most of which can only be found under the heading 'Supercars' though a few were sort of head-scratching choices...

The inclusion of a BMW M1, a Gumpert Apollo, and the McLaren MP4-12C made total sense, but grouping the Honda NSX in there? Well we suppose image is not everything.

As with the Ferrari Pack, the Exotic Pack also offered a limited expansion to the game in the form of some new races, a new championship, and additional Achievements / Trophies.

Beyond that though, the expansion helped to solidify the place that Shift carved out for itself as a legitimate racing simulation of a sort that, more like the very first game in the series, compared to the majority of the games in the series. And of course that is chiefly why it ended up being our second choice in the Top Five of the Game Series: Need for Speed!