Game:

Shift 2: Unleashed (2011)

Duration: 12:55

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With Need for Speed Heat on the horizon I decided to do a quick revisit of the 21 previous NFS games leading up to the launch of Heat. Here you can see Need for Speed 16 (Shift 2), which was released in 2011 for various platforms. In this game I recorded a 16 car race against AI on the Monte Carlo GP Circuit (called "Riviera Monte Grande" ingame) with a Gumpert Apollo.

Shift 2 was relatively similar to Shift 1. More tracks were added with some pretty cool and/or interesting/rare ones like Brno, Dijon, Enna Pergusa, Miami, Shanghai and Monte Carlo.

Just like Shift 1 the game is definitely playable with gamepad but the handling just isn't as good as in franchises like Forza or Gran Turismo, although once again it feels kind of satisfying to get around the AI here. I have been thinking about how to explain this but I am not quite sure how to describe it. Basically the cars are kind of skidding to the side when you are turning in both Shift 1 and 2 and it gives the driving kind of a "rough" feeling. And for casual play against AI where you just care about your position this is kind of a good fit. But it doesn't allow me to be smooth and precise with my driving, so for Time Attack I would highly prefer a handling like in Forza, GT or the NFS games from 2006 and earlier. But I guess this rough feeling is what they were going for in Shift and it's just not what I am personally looking for in racing games, so that's fair enough.

One thing that is a bit worse in Shift 2 compared to Shift 1 is the collision behavior though. I had quite a few attempts when recording this video where I just barely touched another car at the side and then we kind of got pulled towards each other or some other big crash happened.

Shift 2 is also one of the games that I played the least when it first came out. Unlike Shift 1 it didn't have a LAN mode and the netcode in the online multiplayer was horrible, with the other cars warping around quite a lot, so unlike Shift 1 this game barely saw any tournament play.

Like all 21 main NFS games Need for Speed Shift 2 can be played on a modern PC with Windows 10.

I will attempt to show you all 21 existing NFS games before the release of Heat, so expect to see a video almost every day from now until the release of Heat and on some days even two. :)

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