Back in 2005, the charts were filled with driving games drafting behind the massive success of Need for Speed: Underground. It was a time of street racing and fancy visual car upgrades for all. The same year, Need for Speed moved on again, to Most Wanted’s police chase world, and stayed ahead of the pack. The metamorphosis didn’t stop there, with 2007’s Prostreet adding more professional circuit racing into a rather overstuffed mix. For Need for Speed: Shift, that formal circuit racing takes over completely, and it’s a bit of an identity crisis.
It’s not that there wasn’t excess to be stripped away in some of the Fast & Furious trappings that landed less well, but Shift is not a game with a strong idea to replace it with. The process of earning stars to unlock new events is a familiar one because it works, but it can’t help prompt thoughts of a bunch of other games which had a more individual ethos to go with it, including one it replaced at the top of the chart.
When doing more serious racing and time trials, it can’t help but fall short of the precision of Forza Motorsport 2. When pushing you to increase star scores through following the racing line, drafting behind other cars, and shoving them out of the way, it falls short of the inventive kudos system in Project Gotham Racing 4, and that already felt inessential to that game’s appeal. It even has its own inferior London street track which manages to fall hopelessly in between the realism of Gran Tursimo 5: Prologue’s and the scenic thrill of Project Gotham Racing 4’s.
There is a concept of sorts to Shift. As it throws you into a first race at familiar real-world touring car venue Brands Hatch, it sets itself up with an excited voice talking to you about making it in the world of motorsport, and lots of quick cuts between fast cars and big crashes. That hype mode returns a lot at progress points, but the identity of who is talking to you is never fleshed out, and everything you do in between is selected via menu screens. Even TOCA Race Driver did more than that, and what is there in Shift largely feels grating, generic and vestigial. The one more unique thing you get told in those bits is that you have a chance to prove what kind of driver you are.
Series breakthrough Need for Speed: Underground thrived on making visual car customisation part of the upgrade cycle, rewarding your style with a chance to express it further. Shift’s big idea is to theoretically apply the same principle to letting you express yourself through how you drive, not just your choice in garish neon. All of those star points you earn during races come in one of two categories. Drive cleanly, follow the racing line, take corners well, and you get blue precision points. Crash into other cars in assorted ways, and you get red aggression points. As you progress and level up, your profile reflects which ones you get more of, and so do the kind of additional events you get invited to.
That reflecting back means that it’s easy to get stuck on one side or the other once you’re there, but I found it hard to care too much either way. It was mildly interesting to see which side of the line each individual drive fell on (usually precision for me), but not enough to be a central feature, given how limited and dictated by circumstances the choice is. I’ll probably be talking more about this sort of thing as a trend in games of the time, usually more narrative ones, towards this kind of idea of tailored experiences. Together with the continued open world movement, its idea of seeing your choices expressed back to you aligned with the contemporary ascent of social media. In practice, though, the facile dichotomy of Aggressive v Precision is about typical, if not a touch better than Paragon v Renegade.
With structural innovations missing or misfiring, there’s one thing left for Need for Speed: Shift to fall back on, and it’s there in the title. The clearest flow-through from its edgier predecessors is the way it makes a spectacle of speed. The driving model feels like an uneasy balance between slide-y and firm, but when you go fast, you sure know it. The camera pulls back as you accelerate; collisions result in screen shaking and colour effects. Get to fast enough cars and the sense of speed is incredible. The game even sacrifices the legibility of most of the information on your position and points in the name of speed, adding to its small size and lack of contrast by shaking and juddering it along with you.
The problem is that the sense of speed alone as a strength wasn’t doing much at this point given the opposition, and Shift takes a lot of commitment to get through not very exciting racing to even make it that far. Its performance confirmed a decline for the series, and to date it is the last Need for Speed game to have reached the top of the UK charts, something which doesn’t look like changing any time soon. In the space of less than a decade, the series managed to go from the biggest success in the genre and a much-imitated innovator, to a mid-pack follower of Project Gotham Racing, Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo. The fact that Shift sold fastest on PlayStation 3 looks less like a result of the series’s PlayStation history and more like a product of the console not having full versions of any of those other games.
Top of the charts for week ending 19 September 2009:
