Even facing a field of screw-ups, playing Shift requires a good amount of concentration to avoid embarrassment. It's all about knowing when to speed up, slow down, and start your turn. While the game looks and plays like a fairly-accurate racing sim, it does offer an optional "assist" display that indicates optimal speed and turn lines, a feature that saved me from eating too much dust.

The controls felt like a sane balance between hardcore accuracy and arcade looseness--a scheme I was able to get into with a little patience, but one complicated enough to not offend a hardcore racing fan. Pulling too hard in one direction resulted in a quick smack into a wall, but a little drifting was possible with enough skill. Shift isn't Grand Turismo, the reps assured me over and over, and I was certainly placing higher than I usually would in that series.

Plenty of slick view modes are available to racers--an over-the-hood cam, a first-person behind-the-wheel perspective, et cetera. A free-look mapped to the right stick allows a turn of the head to examine the interiors, which were highly detailed--some even featuring minutiae such as air conditioning vents. All of this was running at a solid framerate, albeit on a PC build. The target for consoles is to keep this level of detail running at 30 frames per second.