This is not Need for Speed as you know it — or as you’ve ever seen it before. While some fans will miss the open-world hot pursuits, no one will miss cringing at those cutscenes. So even though the series was ripe for reinvention, we’re impressed by the risk EA took in making this departure — and how well they pulled off a deep, rewarding, challenging sim that brings captivating new ideas to the track.

Need for Speed: Shift’s most immediately remarkable feat is easy to pick: the driver-based view. While the cars and courses are only reasonably pretty, the effort that EA put into using camera tricks and visual effects to duplicate the driver’s perspective pays off spectacularly. It makes the biggest impact in the cockpit view, but even in third-person, the depth-of-field effects narrow your focus in a tunnel-like way. Combined with the visual and tactile bumps and the mini-blackouts after collisions, the game spins a web of immersion that’s pretty dazzling. You really have to see it to understand why it’s the next step beyond the cockpit view that PGR3 pioneered.

But that’s just the icing on a seriously rich cake. The career mode is molten-core deep, supplying a well-balanced variety of race types that you advance through by earning stars, rather than just wins. If you suck at drifting (which you will; it’s the one stupid-hard event), you can earn stars for hitting point milestones or mastering corners, and emerge winless but with a payoff. Or you can just skip events outright and run the races you enjoy.

Along with stars, racking up those points is more interesting than it sounds. The game’s constantly rating you in the categories of Precision (clean passing and laps, perfect launches) and Aggression (trading paint, drafting, wrecking opponents), and collecting the associated points gives you something to do even if you’re about to lap the field. We love how it gives you another thing to do during the race — Shift has very interesting layers.

But make no mistake: even with an arcadey-sounding points system, Shift is serious business. If you cut corners too many times, you’re disqualified from the race. That changes your videogame racing style, and while it’s fine to have rules, they need to be enforced properly. The couple of times we were disqualified, it happened because we were screwing up on a tough track — away from a corner. We weren’t trying to cheat; we were trying to learn, and getting punished for that was the only real low point in this game.

Fortunately, developing mastery of these cars is very engaging, largely because it’s not just about smart braking. Your car will start swaying or bouncing if you transfer its weight poorly or hit bumps badly, and it’s really rewarding to learn to digest all the technical feedback and guide your car to the podium. You’ll also need to be able to detect what’s wrong with a car as you upgrade it. For instance, we had a Skyline GT-R that developed a really loose back end, and we had to spring for a body upgrade that let us increase the rear downforce. If that’s scary to you…well, this game probably will be, too. When you unlock new tiers of cars, you’ll have to begin the process again, learning to cope with and eventually tame the wilder rides. That’s because as you start hitting higher velocities in the better cars, the sensation of speed is impressively intense, and little mistakes hurt a lot. It’s literally the first time a videogame has ever made me think, “Holy crap…maybe I should slow down.”

The multiplayer keeps the good stuff coming. You can race all the event types with seven others on Live, but what really grabbed us was the Driver Duel. A real-time ladder tournament, you compete against one other player in a best-of-three event where the winner moves up a rung and the loser starts again at the bottom. There’s no saving your place or arranging set times to play — it’s all live and on the fly, and it’s a blast.

Shift is hugely entertaining, but remember that it’s not about the sillier fun of its Need for Speed predecessors. It’s about the nail-biting intensity and challenge of hanging on to your car at high speed, and as long as that’s how you like your racing, you’ll disappear into this game.

On Xbox 360

+ Outstanding driver’s view.

+ Deep, addictive career mode with lots of variety and options.

+ Sharp multiplayer racing counts toward single-player career.

? Boy, the announcer’s deadly-dull serious. C’mon, dude…isn’t racing supposed to be fun?

9.0