At metacritic I am seeing lots of 0 - 3 users reviews with the occasional 9 or 10, but most are bad. Is it really that bad?

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/shift-2-unleashed/user-reviews

Good game set up for a racing game and adds a well done night racing element. However, it runs poorly, won't get any more patches and it was a step backwards from the first game in graphics, sense of speed and "joy of driving" for lack of a better term.

Personally I like it a lot, however the cars are setup to accomodate drifting so you need to do some tuning to make them race more as you would expect. There is a ton of good tracks and fun cars. For me the graphics ran just fine on my mid-range gaming system. It doesn't feel quite as realistic as rFactor or iracing but it is close at least.

OK, thanks. Already have the first Shift so it doesn't sound like Shift2 is worth getting too. Maybe Shift3.

I have everything maxed out and I think it looks pretty good, its a really fun game I enjoyed it alot untill some guy went and done an Iracing 2.0 review at SimHQ and I have not played anything else!! damn you! you know who you are!!!

I personally did not like Shift 2 very much. The cars didn't seem to feel right to me. Shift has always kind of felt like I was driving on ice, even with mods that were supposed to help with that.