Upgrading is poorly executed so as to not appeal to fans of sims or arcade racers. Thankfully, you can purchase a car from the race menu and only eligible cars will be displayed, but you’re still not told why these particular cars are accepted while yours is not. When selecting a race, you might be told that you don’t have any eligible cars, but you’re not told what makes a car eligible. It’s hard to tell what any of it means until you’ve spent a couple of hours with the game. The Autolog (a leaderboard of your friends) is displayed so prominently that it’s easy to confuse your position on the Autolog with your position in the actual race. It is a mess of numbers, names, and symbols splashed across the screen with no clear separation between them. There are so many sub-categories of races and so many layers of menus that you have to click through that just finding your way around becomes a chore. This forces any player that would normally use the assists to play at an uncomfortably advanced level from the outset.īefore you can worry about the assists, however, you have to navigate the menus. To actually play Shift 2, the assists must be turned off. You’ll never learn to drive if you use them. The end result is that instead of acting as a teaching tool, the assists become a crutch. Driving with the braking assist means that I rarely have to touch the brake, and with steering assist turned on, the car practically drives itself, turning around corners on its own. This isn’t possible in Shift 2 because the assists don’t actually assist you, they replace you, taking away so much control that it doesn’t even feel like you’re playing anymore. My normal approach to racing sims is to start with every driving assist turned on, making the game nice and easy, and then slowly turn them off as I get better until I can race on my own. Shift 2 is confused about its audience, puts a lot of effort into things that don’t ultimately matter, and is easily the most user unfriendly game that I’ve ever played from a major publisher. But if EA really wants Shift 2 to compete with such popular franchises as Forza and Gran Turismo, it’ll have to do a lot better than this. The Need For Speed name is completely missing from the side of the box and only appears on the front in a small font at the very bottom. Shift 2: Unleashed doesn’t want to be a Need for Speed game.
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