One cool new feature, introduced in Hot Pursuit and revamped for S2U, is Autolog. Essentially, it’s NFS social networking—you can read news and updates, compare your score in every event against your friends, share replays, and if you’re on PC or PS3, upload those replays directly to Youtube. And it’s not a certain section of the game like Hot Pursuit; rather, it’s pervasive, which makes it much more convenient to use. I remember the days of playing time attack comps by setting up multiple consoles or PC’s in the same room and shouting out your time when you beat the current fast one. S2U lets you compare your results in every event with all of your friends, automatically. We’ve come a long way.

Let’s get the nastiness out of the way first. The biggest gripe about Shift was the floaty steering feel connected to the dodgy physics. While S2U is immensely improved—especially in the way understeer and oversteer are transmitted through the wheel – hardcore racers will find the steering wheel support lacking in feel. It’s not a game killer in the eyes of this author, but it does leave you wondering if they’ll patch it down the line.

Just to name a few things that irk nerds like me, the Nurburgring is “softened” throughout, Suzuka’s Turns 1 and 9 are flat when they should be sloped and cambered, the run up to and after the Corkscrew at Laguna Seca doesn’t have enough elevation change, and Mount Panorama (Bathurst) is about twice as wide in the game compared to real life through the hilly bits. Depending on your perspective, these might be significant issues or they could be something completely irrelevant that you won’t notice. Nothing about the track modeling makes them inherently bad, and actually, the extra lane at Bathurst makes the track more racing friendly, which is a good thing, even if a little realism is subtracted. Remember, this game doesn’t claim to be a driving simulator- it’s a racing game. And a certain “real driving simulator” does have its own problems with less-than-perfect track modeling (e.g. Monza).