SHIFT II unleashed review (updated)

I have been playing SHIFT II loads over the last couple of days and have finally decided its nowhere near as good as the first game.

In fact I would encourage anyone who wants to try it to wait until its in the bargain bin as it will be easier to complete the final online achieve by then.
All the other online achieves can be boosted in about 30 mins with one other person in player private matches.

They have replaced the end game sequence with the shiny badges with a dull yellow and black menu screen!! WHY!!

Also the car upgrades options are now awful, they should have stuck with the simple system they had before instead of using a half assed forza rip off and even stealing their D,C,B,A class system.

In the 1st game you could ram other cars and was encouraged too, in this game if you hit any car or they hit you then you will spin off the track and lose loads of time! the smallest hit will end your race on medium difficulty or above.

Handling is much worse in this game than the first, in fact on 99% of the GT3 or any fast cars its HORRIBLE and like trying to control a 200 mph jellied eel.

Having said this the game is easier to get points from.

You can play on easy and get them, plus you only have to get to level 20 this time and not 50.
I am only 12% thru my career yet already on level 15. Why did they lower this???? Will there be DLC that increases the max level cap??
Another epic fail.

The cars are good, the tracks are great, but they have sucked the fun factor out of the game this time around.

Its like they almost copied FORZA 3 but bottled out at the last min and kept some of SHIFT in it still.

So you end up with a shitty halfway house.

You can skip loads of events and just race the ones you need to win to get achieves.

There is zero sense of career or progression rewards.

It all unlocks SUPER quickly.

There are two crappy online achieves to drive you mad, firstly race 10 hours online, this cannot be just sitting in a lobby either.
But far worse and almost impossible is the win the online driver duel.
This is a knockout tournament against other players, with 6 rounds to win it!!

I am quite good at this game and did not get past round 2, you will need some luck and great skill to win this, in fact only manual gears and a perfect launch off the line will ever do it.

Each race is just a one on one duel against one other driver in a best of 3.
So expect to be rammed and spun and hit right off the line.

Overall they have cocked up and dropped the ball and I will be trading this in ASAP while it still has some value.

Nuff said

So if you hate it we will all love it

On a serious note I have played this for only about 30 minutes since I got it so good to here about whats coming up for me in the game

I would be really interested to hear what everyone else thinks about this game.

I LOVED the first 1 hour I played as I loved the first game and got the full 1250G on it.

But slowly the penny started to drop, god knows why they tried to copy bits of Forza when they already had their own unique place in the the genre.

Getting rewarded for shunting cars off the road was FUN, rubbing is racing but not in SHIT II

fair enough mate ... i would have to agree with the fact that the collisions are unrealistic and that if you do hit a barrier or another car , then you always come off worse , which would become very annoying in fact maybe infuriating...this was evident from the fist 20 mins of play i had with you... perhaps i will avoid this title for the time being..

I'm really enjoying it at the moment.I am about level 15 and the more i play the better it gets.The handling is not great to start with(i am using a wheel)but with a bit of tinkering can be made a lot better,infact i now prefer the handling to shift 1.
Some of the achieves may be easy,but a few like winning 75 events on Hard difficulty might prove challenging.
The inclusion of Retro cars is great and thats what i am enjoyng most at the moment,as well as the Autolog and trying to beat other friends times.
In my opinion it a little bit more refined than Shift 1 but just as good.

Stu has hit level 20 (max level) and is not even 50% thru the game.

I am not saying their are not things I enjoy I am just saying really a few things break the game.

1. Low level cap.

2. lightweight car that gets spun from even a light tap.

3. no feeling of career progression like the last had.

4. The excitement factor of the first removed to make a step in the direction of Borza.

They played too much Forza and too much Dirt 2 and should never have hired a chubby Ken Block wannabe to front it all

My final point is I defy anyone to play the first SHIFT game and tel me it was not more exciting and challenging in a good way and not a tiny tap spun your car kinda way.

Here is the GAMES tm review which I think nails it for me.

EA drops the Need For Speed branding from its realistic racing sequel and, with a little help from an ill-advised helmet cam, reminds us that it’s not just 3DS games that can make us feel unwell…

Shift 2 Unleashed reviewIf Shift 2 is to be believed then the True Driver’s Experience – EA’s capitals, not ours – is, more than anything else, one of not being able to see what the hell you’re actually doing. It is true that a real race driver’s view is somewhat impaired by both his helmet and by the cockpit of his car, and Shift 2 attempts to represent this in its much-touted helmet cam by framing your view of the race not just with a car dashboard, but with the inside of a helmet too. Your drive will even automatically turn his head in the direction of each corner as you approach it, just as a real driver would. The resulting effect is certainly impressive, and convincing from an aesthetic point of view, but does it really bring you any closer to what it really feels like to drive a race car? No, it does not.

See, apart from the fact that a real race driver will train for years before competing at any serious level, he also has the benefit of being inside the car and viewing it with his own eyes, which are attached to his own head and can see everything around him in precise three-dimensional detail. You, on the other hand, have further limitations to your view on top of the already obstructive helmet and cockpit. Your TV is a flat, two-dimensional rectangle and the simulated ‘head’ with which you are viewing the action is not your own and keeps moving around when yours doesn’t. In short, it ends up being even more difficult for you than it is for a real driver, and the head cam ends up effectively rendering the game unplayable. Even if you do really persist with it, there’s no way in the world it’ll ever be your favoured view when you’re going for best times or competing online, which means that Shift 2’s main selling point ends up feeling like an impressive but ultimately pointless waste of everyone’s effort. It could be amazing as part of some sort of advanced virtual reality simulation, but Shift 2 isn’t one. It’s just a regular game.

So if and when you, almost inevitably, give up on the helmet cam and switch to playing from one of the more conventional viewpoints available, does the True Driver’s Experience still shine through? Well, it tries, but it’s a bit of a nuisance about it, really. For example, the camera on the from-behind view still lurches about as if subject to G-forces and gets obscured by greasy marks at regular intervals for no real reason. This results in what games™ has branded the Slightly Annoyed Gamer’s Experience, and it would be preferable to just be able to turn it off.

Shift 2 Unleashed reviewIt’s interesting to note that during some of Shift 2’s loading screens feature quotes from real drivers offering their own personal take on what defines the True Driver’s Experience, and one of them in particular is very telling. It doesn’t say, “Dude, it’s in the way your head wobbles about and how you can’t see out of helmet and how everything goes blurry and grayscale when you crash!” No, it sums up the True Driver’s Experience as the feeling that the car is part of your body, an idea that any experienced gamer can relate to. You know you’re in the zone when you forget the controller’s even there, right? So what Shift 2 really needs to do in order to achieve its aims, to make your car feel like an extension of you, is to provide the most intuitive handling model possible. But it doesn’t do that either.

It is, in fairness, better than the handling in the original Shift; certainly not as twitchy or frustrating, but still a little unnatural, with familiar issues such as a slight ‘on/off switch’ feel to traction and the sense that your car is pivoting rather than actually steering realistically. Once you get used to it, it’s perfectly playable and enjoyable enough to drive, but never completely intuitive. So the Driver’s Experience isn’t entirely True in this department either.
And the career mode’s a bit of a disappointment too. It’s not bad, but it’s noticeably inferior to that of Shift and carries a few annoying frustrations of its own. It just doesn’t feel like it has as many special, unique rewards as it did before, with Badges, Stars, Aggression and Precision having been dropped and pretty much every race having exactly the same supposedly unique objectives. Your progress through the career mode also doesn’t feel very deliberately paced. It’s not frustratingly slow, just a bit unfocussed, with rewards not always feeling consistent with the effort put it. The car requirements for many events are also annoyingly vague, with the performance indexes of your opponent’s rides never specified.

There’s certainly nothing game-breakingly bad about Shift 2, and generally it is a polished, high quality, nice looking product. But it does fail to provide a more engaging alternative to the admittedly quite clinical driving experiences offered by the Forza Motorsport or Gran Turismo series. Underneath its fancy aesthetic effects Shift 2 is also rather on the dry side, with no especially compelling reason to pick it up if you already have one of the aforementioned console racing giants in your collection. Unless you really, really feel the need to take a peek inside a race driver’s helmet. Trust us though, it’s mostly just padding.
VERDICT 6 /10
Speed no-one really needs

Still don't think this looks bad. I kinda wanna experience the full head cam thing. Might just sign into a offline profile and have a quick go.

Seems i doged yet another bullet.. i was gonna pick this up today, after the bollaxe that was TDU's annoyance i fancied some online racing.
Think I'll stick with me Blur.. can't go wrong with that any day of the week

Kent is right, I've hit level 20, and my career thing says I'm like 24% through the career mode

Also, it is WAY too easy to master the corners on this one.. you could be crawling round a corner at 1mph and as long as you stuck to the racing line through the corner, it awards you it.

It throws money at you and you rarely actually have to spend loads so it gives too much too quick

i agree with everything that has been mentioned
everything unlocks to easily
hitting the maximum level before 50% is ridiculous and once you hit 20 the races feel more like a grind with little to no rewards.
the online notorious achievement might end up ruining the online like it did in n4s undercover where everyone was leaving there controllers on overnight to get the achievement so you ended up racing yourself
can not bump or nudge your way passed as you will end up into the wall
im glad i only rented it as they have definately taken a step backwards

having got this for free on the pissy 3 i would have to agree with a lot of the posts so far

Its lost a lot of the soul of the original and its just become a bit of a grind fest

Its still a good driving game at heart but its not got the same ooomph that the first one had

Worst thing for me though is the amount of night time races

Totally annoying

Glad I dont buy this series now as I would be a bit miffed to have paid for it