App Review: Need for Speed: Shift [Video]

We’ve shown off several driving games over the last month but Need For Speed Shift is based more around the traditional competitive street racing rather than wacky jumps or drifting and while it doesn’t focus on realism as strongly as its bigger console brother your wheels will be staying firmly on the ground with Shift.

When a big company like EA puts their weight behind a mobile product the potential can really jump out and indeed having twenty actual licensed vehicles from many manufactures, such as Subaru, Porsche, Aston Martin and BMW as well as nearly as many fantastic licensed music tracks including Prodigy’s Run with the Wolves, Shift’s off to an amazing start before it even gets onto the track. These licensed cars can even be upgraded, painted, unlocked and visually customized before you race them in one of the three unique world locations.

So the ‘back of the box’ has a lot of pretty impressive bullet points, but how does it all come together? Well to start off with the driving appears to work rather well and to quote another bullet point, is rather customizable. The default easy setting will take away all control but steering, yep you don’t even have to accelerate or break and this actually makes the game a tonne harder as all you need to do is follow the racing line and you’ll realize that you’ve just become an AI driver. Turning the difficulty to something sensible and you’ll tilt to steer, tap to break and shake the device like a loon to drift. Now the instructions say to drift you need only ‘quickly twitch the steering in the bend direction’ but getting any kind of drift is a nightmare, while this would normally be a minor point you advance in Shift by earning stars on specific events, a system that works really well until a drift event comes up. The problems here are are part of a larger issue in that the cars are really stuck to the track, stamping the break and turning at a high speed into a corner causes you to turn slowly until you drop enough speed. Dispite the claim of “physics-based accelerated 3D graphics” there seems to be very little physics being applied.

The 3D graphics are another story. Shift moves great while still showing off some great visuals. Only four cars can be on the track at once but both they and the tracks look great and Shift also includes in car dashboards for each car that aren’t just unique but also shift from right to left hand drive depending on the vehicle. It’s also worth mentioning that the tracks themselves, while flat, are well designed with tunnels that shine light down onto your car and streets with buildings and details overhead.

Shift has all the building blocks that would make a fantastic racer, but it walks an awkward line between an attempt at realism and arcade that doesn’t come off too well. Hopefully we won’t be waiting a year for a port of EA’s superior title Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit but even with the control problems, Shift is a steal if you can get it for it’s $1 sale price.

When you’re ready, head over to the Android Market and download this game by clicking or scanning the QR Code below.

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