Need for Speed Shift Hands-on Preview

"We really don't like this to be associated with simulation we're learning," said an EA representative.

"It is less of an arcade, I-can-drink-my-beer-when-I-drive game," he added later.

While the two statements might seem at odds, the contradiction gets to the point of Need for Speed: Shift (PC, X360, PS3, PSP). Neither a perfectly-accurate simulation or an arcade racer, Shift sits somewhere between the two, part of EA's three-pronged plan to pull the saturated racing market toward its Need for Speed brand. There's the online Need for Speed, the traditional one with crazy cops (Nitro), and the one for more serious race fans. "Shift" is the latter.

And at a glance, Shift is merely that--just another entry in the race for the car game market. EA knows its target for Shift is primarily an international one--this is one of those racers that has tracks with German names and lots of tight turns--and according to the research, there's room for another game in the grid. The development team at Slightly Mad has a solid pedigree, boasting around 20 members with credits on the award-winning GTR series.

But there are a few things to appreciate here as a casual racing enthusiast, a fact that EA is hoping to exploit. More a fan of Mario Kart and the arcade offerings of PGR, I was skeptical that Shift would appeal to me in the slightest. However, in this early build of the game, one element stood out above all others: the AI.

My experience with racing AI has generally run the gamut from rubber-banding unfairness to computerized racing machines. One way or another, I've never been able to really connect to AI racing opponents in the same way that I might with an online player.

The AI in Shift improves upon this in a very simple way: making the racers potentially as stupid as I am. During my hands-on time, opponents would sometimes cut corners too tightly. I watched a few spin off into the dirt at random. One even caused a multi-car pile-up. Finally, a computer that can screw up as badly as I do.

Of course, reps were quick to note that the difficulty of these racers will be scalable, and the random nature of their AI algorithm is still being tweaked. On higher difficulty modes, the AI will of course be ferocious in its perfection. But at the very least, I was told, there will never be a rubber-banding effect--no racers artificially coming from far behind to spoil your final victory lap.

Even facing a field of screw-ups, playing Shift requires a good amount of concentration to avoid embarrassment. It's all about knowing when to speed up, slow down, and start your turn. While the game looks and plays like a fairly-accurate racing sim, it does offer an optional "assist" display that indicates optimal speed and turn lines, a feature that saved me from eating too much dust.

The controls felt like a sane balance between hardcore accuracy and arcade looseness--a scheme I was able to get into with a little patience, but one complicated enough to not offend a hardcore racing fan. Pulling too hard in one direction resulted in a quick smack into a wall, but a little drifting was possible with enough skill. Shift isn't Grand Turismo, the reps assured me over and over, and I was certainly placing higher than I usually would in that series.

Plenty of slick view modes are available to racers--an over-the-hood cam, a first-person behind-the-wheel perspective, et cetera. A free-look mapped to the right stick allows a turn of the head to examine the interiors, which were highly detailed--some even featuring minutiae such as air conditioning vents. All of this was running at a solid framerate, albeit on a PC build. The target for consoles is to keep this level of detail running at 30 frames per second.

A few standard features were shown off in checklist fashion. Damage modeling is already implemented, and will impact car performance over the course of a race. Collisions are accompanied by plenty of camera shaking and controller vibration, lending a fairly realistic vibe to the presentation. The EA reps noted that the HUD was a work in progress, and indeed it seemed so; too busy and with no option to turn off its many superfluous components. A standard replay engine was shown off, though no details were available on potential online sharing features such as video uploading or ghost leaderboard sharing.

And that's where the game stands today. Shift looks good in its early, bare-bones form, but the question of whether it will provide enough beyond its Need for Speed branding to justify a place in a busy genre is up in the air. Much depends on the multiplayer modes and other features which have yet to be announced.

Need for Speed: Shift coming in fall on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC and PSP.