Need for Speed: Shift

I am quite a hardcore racing sim fan. I own a g25 steering wheel with a clutch and H-Pattern shifter, I’ve dropped literally hundreds of hours into GTR and rFactor and for me, playing games like GRID or Forza is difficult because of the console focused, arcade car handling.

So when I found out that Slightly Mad of GTR and RACE was creating this new Need for Speed game, I got quite excited.

Shift is a semi-sim, in the same field as PGR, Forza and GT5, for me, the controls are perfect and are almost 80% sim BUT there's a large touch of arcade to it even on PRO settings with every assist turned off. With my E86 tuned up and after having raced with it for a few hours, I now know how to handle it. In PRO mode I can push the car so hard, really whack it round bends with drifts and late turns and it still stays on track - this isn't necessarily a bad thing because the controls are super fun and a heck of a lot more sim than say, GRID or PGR. The way the car responds to the road and takes corners is leagues more responsive than in the other semi-sims. It still takes an understanding of sim racing in order to really succeed but like I said you can push the cars much harder than you can with GTR with less skill required. Of course, this is only in the Pro setting, if you're playing with any assists on...this review isn't really for you.
So compared to GT5 or PGR or Forza the car handles more closely to the uber-sims of GTR and rFactor and next to the semi-sims Shift offers a deeper, more visceral and responsive feel. It really does feel like you are driving a car, where I find in especially GT5 and Forza there is a distance between you and your car. For a sim however, it’s still an arcade game.
Another thing that stops it from being a true sim and is something I find frustrating is that you will never get penalised by bad driving. You will get warnings for cutting tracks but that is it, there is no red or yellow flags for accidents or overly aggressive driving, this also means that the AI will smack the shit out of you given a good opportunity and just keep on going.
The AI is amazingly human, but its replicating a human playing shift, not a human racing a car if you know what I mean. The race structure I much prefer to GRID with a larger variety of modes, but again there are no sim elements to it, there is no qualifying or practice laps available so you always start at the back of the pack or somewhere near the middle.
I still however think this is the best racing game I've played in years, the handling is sim enough for me to enjoy it over Grid and the like, but I kind of wish it had a mode for hardcore sim fans because  it’s clear that the physics engine is deep enough, each car handles completely differently and I love how you can tune and upgrade your cars to behave how you want them to, with my E86 for example with it already being a good drift car I've now tuned it so that it handles fast straights without flipping out like it used to.

4/5- but it’s possibly in the top 5 best racing games of all time, quite weird because PGR 2 is a 5/5 game, I suppose it’s because PGR knows what it is and is more focused, you go to play PGR and you know you're going to play an arcade racer, whereas Shift can't really make up its mind. Ten times more fun than the often ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ feeling of Forza or GT5 and a heck of a lot more complex when it comes to the core of simply driving a car at speed. But I do wish it had taken a few more elements from GTR and Forza like qualifying laps and warnings. Shift is a taste of what the next gen sim racer will be like, but I’m afraid when GTR and rFactor catch up to it, it could end up looking like another run of the mill semi-sim in comparison.