Forza Motorsport 4 vs. Shift 2 Unleashed - side by side comparison
447Many gamers expected Shift 2 Unleashed to be the PC version of Forza Motorsport or Gran Turismo.
I myself was very disappointed with the game.
The most important thing in a racing game is the car handling, which is simply terrible in both Shift games. There is no control over the cars, they do what they want, whenever they want to. Coupled with a very noticeable input lag (which can be reduced, but not eliminated, with some tweaks) the game offers no fun at all. All you can do is fight with every car all the time, struggling to stay on the racing line even with all assists turned on.
There are of course lots of mods for this game, and while some improve the handling a lot, there is only so much you can do. The bottom line is that you cannot change the physics completely with any mod, all of them are just a modification of what Slightly Mad Studios were able to come up with.
The graphics in the game are very nice, of course. The tracks are full of details, the lighting is pretty natural, and the car models looks very good as well. On the other hand, considering the game only runs at 30 FPS on consoles, it is not really an achievement.
I like the sound in both games, but there are two things about Shift that are disappointing.
The first one is that all the cars sound pretty much the same.
The other thing is that the loudest sound source is the turbo. What is that about? I am driving a relatively slow sports car, yet I feel like I am taking off in a jumbo jet. What I love about the sound in Forza, is that you actually hear the engine as well as the exhaust. Just listen to the Aston accelerating out of the corners on Suzuka, amazing.
Again, both games were captured at 1280x720, but I decided to put them together in a 1920x1080 frame with 1:1 pixel mapping. The clips were cropped by 12.5 % on the sides, but there was no scaling applied, that way you can see more details on a big screen.
This is the PC version of Shift 2 Unleashed with all visual settings maxed out, except for Motion Blur, which was set to Low. No handling mod was used, only a camera mod.
The Shift series really has the potential to become a great racing game like Forza and Gran Turismo, but they really need to focus on completely reworking the physics. They should not even bother releasing another game if the handling were to stay the same, especially with the C.A.R.S. game coming out in 2012, which is looking good so far.
For me Shift is like GRID. It is a typical arcade game with simulation elements, and that is the worst combination possible. Codemasters had a great ToCA Race Driver series (Forza really reminds me of RD3), and they replaced it with a sim-cade GRID, which was often just as unpleasant as Shift was all the time.
GRID 2 is supposedly coming out in 2012. Looking at how big the difference between the first two DiRT games was, I think it is worth hoping for a very good arcade racing game. I do not want to be disappointed again.
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