I don't remember the last time I played a game that went from being insanely fun to being complete shit as fast as NFS: Shift*.
For as much emphasis as they put on technical vs. aggressive driving, they basically force you into a technical technique for many of the events. The only things that I found fun about what I played were the tier 1 races (didn't do the time attack races, fuck that) and some of the invitational ones. Pretty much the entire rest of the game sucked.
First of all, there's almost no point in buying or upgrading a car. Per NFS tradition, upgrading a car only winds up causing the CPU's cars to get upgraded twice as much. From what I've seen of tier 2, you're best off just sticking to your stock tier 1 car. Additionally, many of the races force a particular make upon you. Unlike racing sims like Gran Turismo and Forza, races that require a specific make or model provide you with a car to wreck race with, making the garage almost entirely pointless. Furthermore, there are very few cars to pick from and very few garage slots available, making car collecting impossible (in contrast, in Forza 2 I own every single car in the game, as well as every car in the DLC packs, proving that I suck at life and that there are some sick bastards that enjoy doing that sort of thing).
Second, the difficulty is all over the map. With most races, easy is too easy, but with special challenges like the car battle (essentially, a head to head challenge with two "equally matched" cars) it gets fucktardedly difficult, necessitating a switch to easy if you don't want to rip all of your hair out.
Third, despite the game's insistence on forcing technical driving, the engine itself really isn't suited for it. Despite the game SHIFTing (HAR HAR) its focus to simulation racing rather than arcade racing, all of the cars have very slippery handling, to the point that it takes practice to keep even low level cars on the road. In other sim racers, like Gran Turismo and Forza, you'll find it hard to lose control with the earlier cars unless you push it to the limit. There are also a few bugs. I've literally had my car spin out on a straight away for no apparent reason a few times, causing me to drop several positions in the race. The game is pretty much doomed to disappoint those who enjoy the campy, arcade-style NFS of recent times and sim racer fans.
Another thing that pissed me off was their attempt at implementing road rules. The system that they have to detect when you've cut a corner is buggy to the point of being useless. I've literally had it invalidate my lap time and flag me for my tires on one side going slightly off the road and allow me to, quite literally, bypass entire strings of turns by simply going off-road.
The damage effects are pretty cool, but they grow very tiring. For one thing, the AI drivers aren't affected by them, allowing them to go on without fail despite driving into another car going 120mph.
Oh, speaking of the AI, it definitely seems to cheat. While this is no surprise, given that it's another NFS game, it's still annoying. They always start perfectly, they can almost always run you off the road without so much as losing speed, and never take more than a couple of seconds to recover from being knocked far off the road or spinning out.
But, anyway, I think that's it for now. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised; the NFS series has been a joke since Underground was shat out (though at least Underground and Underground 2 were fun and playable).
It earns the distinction of being the first GameFly rental that I've sent back within six hours of opening the envelope.
*I could make a joke about the title, but I'm way too mature for that.**
**NFS: SHIT LOLOLOLOL