Featuring the FIA GT1 World Championship and GT3 European Championship plus real-world drivers, tracks, and cars, this is truly tomorrow's sim for today's adrenaline-fueled racer. From authentic car and crash physics to terrifying night racing to the battle-scarred look and feel of both cars and tracks, Shift 2 Unleashed leaves no detail behind in delivering the most authentic racing game experience yet.
The all-new helmet cam recreates realistic driver head movements that deliver an unparalleled sensation of speed: lean and tilt into the apex of corners, feel the impact of every scrape, bump, and crash, experience true in-cockpit vibrations, and more.
The Performance Index is a quick way of telling where you might stack up against you competition. Each vehicle is assigned a number that corresponds to its performance potential.
It's all very straightforward and well-presented. Tuning itself is simple enough and won't require a lot of time to understand.
What might be going on is that the third option (which lends the highest performance boost) probably has the other two included in some way but you couldn't tell by the way it's displayed. None of these parts conflict, but they also can't be installed at the same time.
For instance, if you want to upgrade the air intake on a particular vehicle, there are three parts that you can purchase: performance filter, high flow cone and intake tube, and a cold air intake system. Upgrades are a bit confusing as well, largely due to the way they're handled. Again, it isn't a big issue, just one that left me wondering why there wasn't an additional solution, like a color wheel alongside the HSV setup. It works fine enough but because of the way it's set up, there are some colors that are next to impossible to achieve. Instead of using a color palette, there's a hue, saturation, value system in place. The paint editor also left me scratching my head. This isn't a huge fault by any means, but players won't be creating any Picasso recreations any time soon. Players can customize their vehicles with vinyls via an editor much like the one found in Forza, although its implementation ends up being very bare bones and not really all that impressive. Where customization is concerned, however, there was much to be desired. There were a few incidents where the physics engine had a hiccup or the graphics engine had to play catch-up, but the game ran smoothly for the most part. Very rarely was the fourth wall ever broken on my playthrough, but it did happen. It's often even appropriate so there's basically no complaint here either. The music is the kind of emo alternative rock you'd expect, but it's never intrusive. The engines bellow and the exhausts belch in a way that somehow balances carefully between fanciful representation and faithful recreation. Shift 2 is as good to listen to as it is pretty to look at.