The Need for Speed franchise has slowly gone down the shitter over the course of the last few video games in the series.  Need for Speed: Undercover ended up getting an average Metacritic Rating sitting around the 60 mark between the PS3 and 360 versions, and NFS: Carbon got a better rating around 76 rating on the Xbox 360.  Overall, not great, but not bad.  Passable if we were going by school grades, but nothing spectacular to take home to mom.  The new Need For Speed, entitled “SHIFT” looks to revamp the franchise, crank up the intensity, and pull the Need for Speed franchise kicking and screaming out of the late Fast and the Furious era, and hopefully give you a break from running from those pesky cops.

Does the new Need for Speed game do it’s 84 Metacritic Rating justice? Do you care? Does the title need to have that “f” taken out of the “Shift”? Find out after the jump when I give my impressions of the Need For Speed: Shi(f)t demo.

The first thing you’ll notice about the game is the sound design and the overall presentation of the game.  I’ve mentioned this a few times in my reviews and impressions, and it’s a big deal for me.  I normally don’t even watch opening videos on racing games. What’s the point? They show you high angle helicopter shots of the terrain, a few turns to watch for, and then put you in the cockpit?  Who needs that wasted time over and over again? Just put me out there so I can follow the racing line on the track and bump a few other cars off of it.  I ended up playing through each track twice, and watched the opening video each time.  It’s like watching a little mini action movie before you get going.  The camera angles, the Transformer-like sound effects, the overall look of these videos leads in to the race to help get the blood pumping that much more.

The view from the cockpit looks absolutely great.  It’s obviously the view that the developers want you to use.  While you are in cockpit view mode you are also given the option to look around freely with the right stick.  You can in fact look up at the headliner and see if you can figure out the different drink stains (or something far worse) if you want to.  The car interiors look a tad bit more detailed than Forza 3 I thought, and in turn it makes you want to look at them.  This feature in NFS: Shift adds to the intensity, though.  You still get a good view of the road ahead in cockpit mode, and the dash and gauges don’t feel obtrusive at all.  I found myself looking over at my opponent as I was trying to pass him to see if I was able to cut in front before the next turn.  It gets pretty intense on the straightaways with your engine pumping loudly around 130mph.  You can almost feel the vibration of the car in your hands, and the fact that I wasn’t looking at the road ahead was even more intense.  And before you ask, yes, I did try and text while driving my race car.  It’s the only way I will learn.

Another new feature to the game is the dizziness you feel after hitting other cars too fast, running into barricades or slamming into guard rails.  I usually am a pretty good driver (in games) so I slightly brushed a guardrail or two on a corner and had my driver’s eyes go gray.  Really?  It seemed like the sensitivity on this feature was a little high in the demo?  I thought I would just get away with a scraped door but didn’t know that the little scoff would make my driver’s eyes go color-blind for about 2 seconds.  In the end, despite it popping up for small ding, it was a neat feature that really added to the tense nature of the race with not knowing what is going on-either while you are looking away at something, or waiting for you vision to clear.

The controls for the game are pretty responsive, if maybe a little “heavy” for a racing game.  I compare it to the complaint about the heavy type of controls in the early Killzone 2 era.  Some thought of the controls as “realistic”, but others wanted the great control sensitivity of COD4 while sacrificing a little realism.  The cars end up handling like they are supposed to, each different in their own small way.

From what I saw of Need for Speed: Shift, the game gets down into the nitty gritty of racing, leaving Forza 3 to look like a nice sunny afternoon drive in the country. It might not have the technical underpinnings like the Telemetry tab in the replays, but it’s a solid game.  I’ve seen a few specials for the game online for $40 bucks, and I just might have to pick it up.  The demo is that good.  In my mind it gives the player a much better feeling of driving in a race car than Forza 3 does.