Need For Speed: Shift

The vibration of the controller is never so sickening as it is when playing Need For Speed: Shift.

It means that once again, I’ve got on the break too late and am trundling through the gravel trap while cars fly past: turning my third place into eighth.

Obviously, the corners are the hard bits. It is possible to lose it on a long straight, especially in the high powered supercars available in this game, but I tend to reserve my most enraging errors for the tight turns.

Playing the game on “hard” it is quite easy to win some types of race if you maintain control. You don’t have to go mad. I was surprised that at this difficulty your hand is still held by “breaking assist” and “steering assist” unless you turn those functions off. Hard is by no means the hardest difficulty but there are two easier ones so I expected to have to drive the car for myself, rather than let the machine do it while I go and make a cup tea.

Obviously, as soon as I turned them off, I flew off the track and into barriers everywhere and it took a lot of patience to learn to play the game for myself even to a bad standard, but I’m glad I did it.

One part of the game I looked forward to was the drift competitions, but I just can’t do it! I think I once failed to finish last in one stage, but it was a not to be repeated fluke.

Like most games, I’ve suffered much frustration at the hands of NFS Shift, but getting a stage right, or sometimes just getting a corner right, makes it all worthwhile.

Note to self: buy Shift 2 Unleashed and play until arthritis sets in.