Need for Speed strikes back.
First of all, visuals. The game looks great. It does not have the extra use of HDR, so it looks more colorful rather than sepia-washed. The menus are plain and simple. But it could have been improved, need a bit polish. Annoying thing about the menu what I felt was the camera continuous rotates around the car. Could have been a static view. But worst about the menu was, the cars used to take a lot of time to load, making it quite frustrating to flip through your car collection. The games engine needs a lot of optimization and is needs to be fine tuned. ATI cards v1.02 patch is must otherwise there are lots of issues related to frame rates. Among them V-Sync is a killer, it affects a lot on the frame rates. Otherwise cars are beautifully rendered and best till date on PC. Attention to detail is very good, they reflect lights well and tail light looks nice. Driving with the cockpit is an exhilarating experience. The blur effect after a crash is a neat addition. Only problem what I faced was that there was some frame skip during collisions. I am not sure what is the cause for the problem, may be an driver update or a patch can fix that. A lot of people blaming about the PhysX, but there is nothing of that sort. All the PhysX stuff goes to processor and not the GPU. Damage modeling is quite contemporary, nothing extraordinary. Specular aliasing is present even though you max out the anti-aliasing. EA should come up something solid like EGO engine from Codemasters, that's near perfect and flawless.
Next, the audio is very good. Engine roars of the cars feels quite original, turbo charged cars make an audible whistle which is appreciable. Tire screeches only when necessary, unlike in ProStreet where screeching noise was always there when ever you steer a car. Also the engine sound of a car changes whenever there is performance upgrade.
There is a learning curve involved, but one can always adjust the assists. AI drivers are good at chasing you even you are at front and leading. They will not give up and there is always a chance that a car can bang on you to put you outside the track. There is also a varied game mode. Among what I liked most is the driver duel where cars from different manufacturers are pitted against each other. Good thing is that the competing cars belong to the same category, for example, Mitsubishi Lancer Evo IX is pitted against Subaru Impreza STI, both legendary rally cars, known for their handling. Drift events are bit tough but are not impossible. Car customization options are good, if you are less into customization and more into racing, you can quickly put some readymade liveries and the car can still look good, and if you are a customization wizard, there are lots of vinyls and color options to play around with. Again on the tuning front its same situation, you add up performance kits or tune individual components. Overall Shift has given lot of freedom to the players on what they want to do and what they won't. If you don't like drift, skip it and move on, you can still progress through the career mode.
Car collection is quite good though not satisfying There are lot of BMWs which I found a bit unusual. There should have been more cars from more manufacturers, considering licensing is not a big issue for likes of EA. There should have been more from legendary manufacturers like Porsche. And I don't understand why Ferraris are there as DLC, that's also not for PC. That's really really bad. Hot Pursuit 2 was the last to feature a Ferrari. A lot of fans are very angry about that when Forza and GT are offering 7-8 variants of Ferrari. Stuffs like these are reasons why NFS is losing ground to its competition. EA should come with something 'mega' content wise.
Overall, the joy of NFS is back and its total fun. It's a refreshing change and its good that EA has brought something different on the NFS platter rather than evading cops and in-game cutscene movies. It is an appreciable effort in bridging the gap between arcade and sim racing. But a little more fine tuning to every aspect of the game should have made it the best racer on PC.