Your tires screech and slide across the surface while dirt tosses onto your windows. Shift 2: Unleashed tosses the blackboard and its scribbles out the window. In those games you get a smooth experience free from the loud, shaky experience that is real racing. While games like Forza Motorsport 3 and Gran Turismo 5 try and simulate how a car behaves on tarmac mathematically, Shift 2: Unleashed takes a different path. I do get the same sense that the center of gravity is located higher up, same as in the predecessor, as if some cars levitate above the tarmac. The sense of speed has been tweaked down compared to the predecessor. The tire physics is still a bit loose and the brakes don't measure up. The opposite of what I found with Forza Motorsport 3 and Gran Turismo 5. No matter how I try I find the racing easier to with the controller rather than the steering wheel. With your car on the course and with PC-version at max settings, I'm clocking in at 98 frames per second and I get to finely tune my Logitech G27. The menus within this mode feel overloaded, the amount of information in each screen make for a cluttered mess. Earn enough and its on to the next level with tougher competition sporting better cars. There's different classes to complete and points to be gained in each race that combine to increase my total after each tournament or cup.

The career mode is structured much like the one in the original or for that matter in Forza Motorsport 3. I guess the idea is to attract new players, but what results is a mixed message, and a failure to commit to what Shift 2 is really about. It feels corny, tacky and tagged on to a game that is at its core, a simulator. Into the game proper and quick competitions are intermixed with cutscenes full of attitude, and you're going to have to deal with a bunch of gang-related gestures. Slightly Mad Studios have taken inspiration from Codemasters arcade style racing games, and, with Formula D champion Vaughn Gittin Jr, I'm thrown around inexplicably cluttered menus.

At times it feels like I'm playing the predecessor, but now with a strange narrator voice to keep me company. Shift 2: Unleashed isn't a major update on the previous game.

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