Need for Speed: Shift Hands-On Preview

Shifting the emphasis: Kikizo goes hands-on with Slightly Mad's reinvention of Need for Speed.

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The left stick is your steering wheel, the triggers are gas and brake pedals, and right stick turns your driver's head to stare lovingly around your glossy cabin, swimming in real-time dynamic shadows, glowing LEDs and licenses, dazzling you with its syrupy next-generation-ness until you plough off road and fetch up against one of the indestructible spectators. The D-pad toggles the names of your rivals and disables or enables the HUD (your dashboard is a worthy substitute in cockpit mode), while the bumpers switch between automatic and manual gear-changing. A splash of arcade sensibility exists in the form of a colour-coded racing guide, indicating the best line through a corner and how hard you should brake.

Slightly Mad is keeping schtum on the number of courses available, but the selection will cover 15 non-virtual locations, some of them witness to rubber-burning in reality, others fancifully modified for the game's purposes. Brands Hatch is an example of the former, a relatively gentle course set in sunny Kent countryside which, according to the official site, boasts a "unique combination of dips, cambers, fearsome corners and hills." You start out on a long straight, before swooping into a medium turn with a generous sand verge - cause of many an initial upset as impatient drivers try to overtake on the outside curve. A smattering of physics-enabled traffic cones and stacked tyres hinder progress but never stop you dead.

The other locale we were shown was central London. A respectable number of landmarks were in evidence, from the particular species of trees that line the Embankment to the Park Plaza hotel near Waterloo and the Houses of Parliament themselves, but the streets were devoid of strutting pinstripe suits, Japanese tourists and Big Issue sellers. The course, which takes you over the Thames and back again, is a sinuous, uncompromising she-devil which splits fleetingly in two early on, hammering the offshoots back together directly before a murderous left turn.

Each rival driver has his or her own dynamic AI, with some more apt to play rough if you shunt them around, but as with other examples of such functionality it's hard to distinguish between deliberate bullying tactics and coincidental collision - or at least not on the strength of our few hours' play. The engine, two years in the making and intensely pretty, has been optimised for cross-platform performance, and discounting the odd frame-rate plunge and system crash its pre-alpha incarnation is impressively stable, as the producer demonstrated by pausing a race to change the time of day and lighting models. PC owners morosely contemplating another hardware upgrade will be reassured to know that the game will run on a Dual Core 8800 CPU - no pocket calculator, but a comfortable distance from cutting edge.

Much of Need for Speed: Shift remained under wraps at our hands on - perhaps most significantly, online multiplayer is still an unknown quantity - but as it stands the game seems unlikely to disappoint the racing game purists at whom it is unambiguously aimed. As an example of innovation within a franchise, it's also yet another reproof to those who persist in thinking of John Riccitiello's EA as a soulless conglomerate of sales teams and executives, warming over the same licenses year-on-year. The dismal Undercover notwithstanding, there's still a need for speed.

Need for Speed: Shift is released for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PSP, and PC towards the end of the year.

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