Hm. Most of the puzzle titles I'd recommend are point-and-click adventure games, so I'm not quite sure what to posit from there.
Next up on the racing game rotation is Shift 2: Unleashed, the Need for Speed game that took itself so seriously, it dropped Need for Speed from the title. Luckily, the actual game isn't so grim, besides perhaps the overdramatic menus and introduction. It streamlines things nicely, taking out the Guitar-Hero-esque Stars for career progression entirely, removing the (barely existent) distinction between Aggression and Precision points, and altering bonus objectives to now just give you a flat XP reward. Gaining XP earns you levels, gaining levels unlocks career events. Very simple and encourages playing however you want (multiplayer and quick race events still count towards your total), with very few exceptions to let you jump ahead if you're gunning right for a specific tournament, and one major exception in the final career tier - GT1 - being locked off until you win the GT3 or Works championship.
There's two physics models here, and while you can change it to whichever you like, one is recommended to you after a minute or so of play at startup; I've been using the Experienced handling, which is much more like a sim than the first SHIFT. I'd call it "Project CARS, except satisfying". (Which is really how I'd sum up the whole game, but hey.) With Experienced handling on, I've found myself getting lodged harder into walls and spun out more easily; it won't bounce you back to the racetrack like the first game did. I keep expecting impacts to go a lot more easily than they actually do; I feel vaguely
like Carl Edwards on that. Still, it's not completely brutal, though the AI in higher-powered cars seem to have the ridiculous unwarranted level of aggression they do in PCARS. (I keep comparing them because, while EA published Shift 2 and Bandai-Namco published PCARS, they're the same dev team.)
The menus are outright obnoxious at first, overly cluttered and loud, but eventually, you get used to them, and the bizarre soundtrack theming of "orchestral electronic remixes of punk rock songs" is at least very consistent and distinctive. It's growing on me. The car selection is very, very nice, with high-end supercars and standard street cars from a ton of automakers. I was very happy to find that playing NFS: Hot Pursuit 2010 meant I got to keep a police Lamborghini Reventon from that game. I originally hesitated to pick this game up because two packs of free DLC had been removed from the online store; I hadn't realized that the Steam version actually just patched them in since they were free anyways, so the Legends and Speedhunters packs are there by default.
While the game has a lot of variety when it comes to courses and event types, I find those additions really help. Usually, racing games nowadays overextend by trying to do a bit of everything, and doing all of it poorly; this game has a good enough selection of everything it attempts that nothing feels underwhelming. Even drag racing, which is a straight quarter-mile course and thus doesn't change, has three separate locales just so you have varied scenery. Every course from the first game returns and seems to be remodeled to fit the new physics, so there's a bunch of road courses, street circuits, and ovals to battle on. And despite being a 2011 game, it doesn't restrict itself to courses that existed then; 2009's Silverstone International layout is available, and the Legends DLC means you can race course variants from 1952 to 1978, including Rouen les Essarts, which closed in 1994. It doesn't sound like much, but it's really awesome in practice to be able to race classic cars on courses actually designed for
them instead of for modern cars.
It is a bit amusingly dated to 2011, though, much as having intentionally outdated stuff added helps balance that. The energy-drink dudebro vibe is very slightly present here, and Formula Drift star Vaughn Gittin Jr. narrates the game in place of the British crew chief from the previous title. He lacks the pattern of facial hair he more commonly wears now, too, which makes it feel off if you
do know who he is. All of the rival drivers in this game are real drivers in their discipline this time (with the exception of the Standing Mile champions, Twins Turbo, who instead are supercar tuners rather than competitors). Chris Rado dropped off the map the year after this game, and actually grenaded the engine of the Time Attack car you can win from him here. Finally, and most obviously, the final championships you battle to get into, the real-world licensed FIA GT3 and GT1 championships, folded in 2012. So, it's absolutely a time capsule in that regard, and it came out at just the right time to capture the car culture of right then.
As with the first game, I haven't tried drifting yet. I do very much like the actual Formula Drift, though; a very good watch every now and then.