Shift 2 feels like a game that could have used a few more months of development
The helmet cam was a huge let down. Now, I'm sure that it needs a bit of getting used to, but I didn't have the patience. I could see what it was aiming for, and certainly on the straights it added a new depth and excitement. But the way the camera shifts on corners is very disorienting, fooling you into thinking you're already turning when you're not, thereby forcing you to turn too late and inevitably crash. Needless to say I switched back to the regular cockpit view pretty quick.
The AI is far too aggressive, and the physics are way over the top. I admit that one of the issues in the first game was that the opponent cars seems to weigh nothing, allowing you to steamroller through them with barely any trouble. It's good to see that they tried to address this, however it seems to have gone too far the other way. Now, it's your car that seems weightless, and any contact with another vehicle is likely to send you off-track and cause you to lose the race. Even a relatively gentle nudge to the rear of the car infront will invariably send you careening off the track as though your vehicle was side-swiped by tank, leaving the AI driver to continue on his merry way uneffected. It's extremely frustrating.
I read several reviews claiming that the graphics were a big improvement over the first game. Frankly, I couldn't see it. In fact, they seemed slightly worse. Car models in the garage look plain, there are a multitude of jaggies on track, not to mention significant screen-tearing. Maybe these issues are absent if you're fortunate enough to own a TV capable of 1080p, but in 720p the visuals are lacklustre to say the least.
The night racing was cool, but nothing outstanding. Let's face it, night racing isn't exactly a new thing - most racing games have featured it before, so I wasn't enturely sure why Slightly Mad were making such a big deal of it.
The menus and displays are messy and confusing. I really liked the clean, simple menu style in the first game - information was presented in a no-nonsense way. In Shift 2, the menu system is so busy you need to spend way too much time squinting at the screen to find what you're looking for. Even the in-race HUD is a little confusing - it took me several races to work out which part indicated my race position and which indicated the lap number.
To round it all off are some truly banal, irritating voice-overs and cutscenes from real world race drivers. After being bombarded with meaningless, insincere, cliched affirmations like 'Let's rock!' and 'Push it!' I had to turn the speech volume down to zero. I found myself missing the understated voice-over from the first game (even though it was clearly some American putting on a questionable English accent).
All-in-all I would have to say that Shift 2 is not, by any means, an improvement over the first game, infact it's taken several steps back. After 2 hours, I turned it off and went gratefully back to Shift 1.