Need for Speed: Shift might be the most aptly named Need for Speed you'll ever play. The series has been gradually downshifting from spirited and ambitious to pandering and low-tech. The last few games have been hipster wanna-bes, grasping corporately at the car culture demographic. And if they couldn't have that, they'd take people who go to Fast & Furious movies. But as a guy who goes to Fast & Furious movies myself, I've watched the long slow sad descent with dismay. Poor Need for Speed. I guess this is what happens when you're a red-headed stepchild to the Burnout golden boy.

But all that changes - or shifts, you could say - in Need for Speed: Shift.

Read the review after the jump.

I never thought a Need for Speed game would be so much like wrestling. Previously, you've just pointed, accelerated, and occasionally jinked. Some low-rent city whizzed by on either side, pretending to be an open-world experience. But Shift moves Need for Speed to a new home on closed circuit courses. There are a few point-to-point races, and some of the courses successfully attempt an open road vibe.

For a racing game set on such controlled courses, Need for Speed: Shift is surprisingly wild and even unwieldy. It's mainly the driving model. Toggling on the various driving aids makes it easier, but also generic. It loses a lot of personality. Need for Speed: Shift comes alive with its initially unsettling loosey-goosy handling. This can range widely between charming and frustrating, but in the end, it's mostly satisfying. With driving aids turned off, this game goes from a domesticated indoor cat to a face full of ocelot. If I weren't allergic to horses (true story!), I'd probably use this horse metaphor instead of a cat metaphor: Need for Speed: Shift is a game you have to tame before it will take you on any sort of meaningful ride.

The problem is that there's no incentive to play with a challenging driving model beyond "it's more fun this way". You have to want to master the driving. The gameplay or caRPG progression isn't going to do anything to encourage it. Since I've already used household cats and horseback riding for metaphors, are you ready for another weird point of comparison? In certain other genres - realistic flight sims, super-detailed strategy games, weird tactical JRPGs - there's a feeling of satisfaction as you master a complex and initially overwhelming system. A lot of the gameplay in those genres is wrestling with a new system, not necessarily beating an opponent, or progressing through a storyline. I get the same feeling from the driving model in Need for Speed: Shift. Turning that face full of ocelot into a meaningful ride, if you will.

Consider who made this game. The developer is a studio that consists partly of the folks who helped make the challenging GTR and GT Legends games. This isn't some edgy studio with a skull for a logo. It's a bunch of sim heads worrying about physics. Electronic Arts deserves kudos for letting these guys do their thing under the Need for Speed rubric. Electronic Arts also deserves kudos for EA-ifying the presentation without compromising the content.

In fact, the EA-ified front-end actually helps move Shift along at a steady clip while you're wrestling with the driving model (ror a worst-case scenario of an EA-ified front end actually bogging down an otherwise excellent game, see Codemasters' Dirt 2). The system of rewards is blatantly manipulative, but it's also effective. As you play the career, you constantly get little gifts, but they're presented as if they were spectacular. Badges! Matte paint options! A new level! More stars that will unlock more races! Room for another car in your garage! Who's the man? You're the man! Have another fifty grand! As long as the underlying game isn't terrible, I'm a sucker for this sort of thing.

One of the things EA is really good at is reminding you how you're doing. After every race, you see your badges, your experience points, how many more points you need to level up, and so forth. For these things to work, they have to be in your face without being too obnixious. Need for Speed: Shift strikes that balance nicely.

It's a huge help that the experience point system has personality. There are two separate categories of experience: one for driving clean, and one for driving dirty. They're called precision and aggression, respectively, but we know what they mean. Each category has a set of actions that award experience points. During a race, if you push precision or aggression high enough, you'll earn double points. At the end of the race, you see exactly how many points you earned from exactly which actions. It's a clear-cut above-board system of actions and consequences.

One of the nifty things about this experience point advancement system is that it's completely independent of whether you win or lose a race. One of the fastest ways to get me to turn off a racing game is to refuse to recognize the time I've spent driving. If my time is completely wasted unless I come in third place or better, as soon as I place fourth, I start thinking about moving on to a game that appreciates me. Give me some form of advancement, whether it's as superficial as Wipeout HD's loyalty points or as rich and satisfying as Shift's experience points, and I'll keep playing your game even after coming in last place several times in a row.

Every so often you'll get to do a special challenge race based on what kinds of points you've most accumulated. Among the precision awards are points for mastering corners. This is a matter of cleanly following the best line around the corner, and it tags that corner with a permanent icon. Too few racing games come up with clever solutions like this to reward "correct" driving.

In fact, this approach reminds me of an under-appreciated Playstation 2 game called Enthusia. Remember that one? Yeah, I didn't think you would. But it had a whole separate track of advancement that rewarded clean driving.

As your progress up the tiers in Shift, the driving model gets even more challenging as you get more powerful cars. You unlock a wider range of locations and more diverse types of races. I have a few choice words for the drift races, but I can't print them here until Fidgit has some provision for age-gated content. In the middle stages of the game, it's getting harder to avoid the drift races, which are a whole other type of wrestling. But like Need for Speed: Shift as a whole, it's a challenge. Too few racing games are this confrontational. Too few dare me to get better. Too few ask me to wrestle and fail and wrestle some more. For this more than anything else, Need for Speed: Shift is a game I respect, admire, and sometimes even enjoy.