Need for Speed Shift 2 Unleashed

EXPERIENCE THE WORLD’S NEXT GENERATION SUPERCAR PAGANI HUAYRA EXCLUSIVELY IN SHIFT 2 UNLEASHED.

For centuries the wind has been viewed as nature’s paradox with its ability to be both gentle and powerful. The newly-unveiled Pagani Huayra, named after the Andean God of Wind, reflects this dichotomy and will be available exclusively in SHIFT 2 UNLEASHED.

Feel what the Driver’s Battle is actually like in the only truly realistic racer on the market. Battle the world’s best drivers head-on across multiple racing disciplines to become the FIA GT1 World Champion.

The critically acclaimed SHIFT franchise returns to the track with SHIFT 2 UNLEASHED™. The most immersive racing experience to date brings the True Driver’s Experience to life with all the intensity and exhilaration of being behind the wheel and competing in the Driver’s Battle. From the all-new helmet cam to night racing to frighteningly real physics and crashes, SHIFT 2 UNLEASHED delivers all the violence and excitement of race day in a groundbreaking authentic racing experience.

Next Level of Immersion—Experience visceral first-person racing like never before. 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.

True Realistic Racing—SHIFT 2 UNLEASHED redefines the racing simulator genre by bringing the atmosphere of race day to life. 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. 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.

Amazing Career Depth and Variety—Earn unlocks and participate in multiple racing disciplines on the way to becoming the FIA GT1 World Champion. Featuring everything from new Endurance races to muscle and retro cars, SHIFT 2 UNLEASHED gives you the flexibility to choose the path that fits your individual racing style. Fight for position, dominate opponents, and annihilate track times every time out—the battle doesn’t end at the finish line, it extends throughout your entire racing career.

Change the Game with Autolog—Autolog is a revolutionary system that connects friends and changes the gameplay experience by allowing you to share virtually every aspect of your racing career. Compare Driver Profiles and career status, share and comment on pictures and videos, send challenges, and pull news feeds directly from NFS.com and Speehunters.com. Autolog recommendations amp up the social competition of real-world racing by delivering challenges based on friend activity, creating a dynamic, competitive, fun new way to play both online and offline.

Customize for Show or Customize to Win!—Unleash your creativity to turn some of the world’s most elite high-performance vehicles into fire-breathing weapons. Customize the engine, the body, the suspension, and much, much more, then put your ultimate racing machine to the test in any mode. Whether your goal is to race a 1000-horsepower Econobox or a tricked-out GTR, you have nearly limitless options to reign supreme on the track where every second counts.

Fun though arcade-style racing games are, true petrol-heads crave a level of realism that delivers a much truer evocation of the adrenaline-generating rush of real-life motor racing. So they should be happy to discover that Shift 2 Unleashed provides exactly that. It’s essentially a racing sim, with a physics engine that represents the state of the art (although that doesn’t mean it excludes those born without the sheer talent of a Lewis Hamilton or Jenson Button, as driver assists are on hand until you develop the bravery to crank it up to the Elite difficulty level). But whereas most racing sims adopt a clinical look and feel, Shift 2 Unleashed ratchets up the atmospherics to a heart-pounding level.

Not only does it communicate an incredible sensation of speed, using clever visual tricks like motion-blur, but it has a full damage engine, turning your every indiscretion into a dinged or crumpled body panel. And then there’s the innovative Helmet Cam, the most true-to-life representation of the view a real racing driver enjoys in the cockpit – which cleverly apes drivers’ sight-lines by, for example, homing in on the apex as you approach a corner. Not to mention proper night-driving – a first for a videogame – with rigorously modelled headlights cutting through the darkness. It’s safe to assume that non-virtual drivers booked in for their first 24-hour races will be using it to find out just what to expect on a real-life night-time stint.

A number of things instantly strike you when you first play Shift 2 Unleashed. Chief among them being the realistic feel, which complements the looks – you get a great sense of gradient-changes on the tracks, the controls feel fantastically responsive, and cars are launched into the air if you clatter kerbs, just like their real-life counterparts would be. Of course, Shift 2 Unleashed features most of the finest tracks on the planet – Australia’s legendary Bathurst is new, along with Shanghai, among old favourites like the Nordschleife and Brands Hatch – and a mouth-watering selection of machinery, including the yet-to-be-driven Pagani Huayra. You can indulge your FIA GT fantasies, too, as Shift 2 Unleashed incorporates the premier endurance racing formula’s official licence – unsurprisingly, given that a Need For Speed team competes in its GT3 class.

It becomes most obvious that Shift 2 Unleashed operates under the Need For Speed umbrella when you play it online. That’s because it includes the mighty Autolog, as seen in Hot Pursuit – which has been significantly upgraded since Hot Pursuit. This time around, it has a Facebook-style Wall, and as before, it lets you compete against your friends’ best times, even when they (or you) aren’t online. Shift 2 Unleashed’s Autolog implementation dynamically tracks the career progress and personal best times of you and your friends (so it’s always bang up to date), and makes it much easier to share and compare snapshots and videos of your best moves, crashes and so forth. Plus, of course, it lets you set up your own customised online races and challenges.

If you reckon you’re truly serious about motor-racing, then you’ll find that Shift 2 Unleashed is just what you’ve been seeking. It’s a proper petrol-head’s dream.