Need for Speed Payback Thoughts / Review:
Difficulty: “Hard”
Time Played: “17 Hours”
Need for Speed Payback is a racing video game developed by Ghost Games and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It is the twenty-third installment in the Need for Speed series. The game was revealed with a trailer released on June 2, 2017. It was released worldwide on November 10, 2017. Need for Speed Payback is a racing game set in an open world environment of Fortune Valley. It is focused on “action driving” and has three playable characters (each with different sets of skills) working together to pull off action movie like sequences. In contrast with the previous game, it also features a 24-hour day-night cycle. Unlike the 2015 Need for Speed reboot, Payback includes an offline single-player mode.
Racing simulators are thriving within the genre these days, but arcade racers offer a brief respite from the tighter sim experiences and will always have a home with the casual gamer. “Need for Speed” is a long-running series that was started way back in the year 1994 and has taken on many forms throughout its history. With this latest entry, it is adopting the high-octane drama that you’d find in summer blockbusters. Does Need for Speed Payback get the checkered flag? NOPE. It sure does have some fun ideas, though.
Pros:
+,-: Need For Speed Payback starts off with quite a bang. The prologue mission introduces you to all the main players in this high-speed drama. That includes the three playable characters that make up the crew (plus the unplayable mechanic). You’ll control the characters throughout the single-player campaign. Almost immediately, there’s chaos, cops, and betrayal. Unfortunately, shortly after that, the prologue’s pace nosedives.
+,-: Graphics in this game are pretty, like most of the latest Need For Speed games on release. However, they aren’t quite up to par with the last one. Payback’s dry and dusty casino city and its outskirts do make for a large and varied map (and it boasts a day/night cycle this time around). It’s beautiful to look at but it’s not nearly as good-looking as the grimy, reflection-packed, rain-slick asphalt of Need for Speed 2015.
+: The sound of each car is outstanding. They are very true to original real-world sounds. You can feel that there’s enough sense of weight, grip and momentum to tell you that you’re racing a Mustang, a Subaru Impreza or some exotic hypercar – but not enough to leave you spinning uncontrollably when you take some ridiculous right-turn.
+: Taking down cars in this game has a welcome enough Burnout 3 flavor to it – muscling your pursuers into spectacular slow-motion collisions with poles and parked cars is fun – but I don’t think it was worth losing proper pursuits for.
+: Driving model is fun and spectacular to play but not exaggerated
+: Need for Speed Payback offers you a lot of types of races to choose from. You’ll pull up to checkpoints within the open-world, from there you can race, go off-road, drift, drag, and even runner events providing plenty of variety. There are also Forza Horizon-esque speed traps and drift challenges spread out across the open-world.
Cons:
-: One of the biggest problems with Need for Speed Payback is that it plunges you into its unrelentingly embarrassing, hackneyed and unoriginal story. The characters are either terminally dull, downright annoying, or both. Making matters worse is the fact that whenever you get to an interesting point in a story-mission – such as having to nail a precise jump – the action is taken out of your hands and a cut-scene kicks in and it fails spectacularly in a great white puffy cloud of amateurishness and dialogue that Michael Bay would reject for being too basic.
-: The dialogue is hammy, but not in a fun B-movie way, and it frequently goes out of its way to reference everything from The Matrix to Dragon Ball Z, with some cringe-inducing millennial slang shoehorned in for good measure. There’s also the kind of forced banter that’s become commonplace in video games and is dutifully featured here–where, for example, calling someone “Lil’ Ty” is absolutely hilarious to anyone within earshot. All of this might have been bearable if the story was confined to the intermittent cutscenes, but the narrative is so prevalent in everything you do that there’s little respite from its trite storytelling.
-: Even though open-world gives you different types of races to choose from, the open-world isn’t especially memorable and lacks life.
-: The police chases in Need for Speed Payback are just sprint races with cops ramming you. They are lame and absolutely no strategy involved. Just reach a point and you miraculously escaped! YAY! I guess…
-: Online multiplayer is a pretty terrible experience for the time being. Essentially, every match is a race to see who can grief the quickest and separate from the pack. Until there are penalties for this, you better get with the program and ram your way to victory.
-: Personally, I encountered technical issues when playing, with textures loading throughout matches, not being automatically kicked out to the menus at the end of an event, and a couple of other issues.
-: This might have the stupidest mechanical upgrade system I have probably seen. It takes the form of a trading card game known as “Speed Cards”. It forces you to play at least forty minutes to collect a speed card to upgrade a car. Or you simply can buy them with in-game currency, which either requires grinding or using micro-transactions to buy them with real-life cash. The ratios at which you earn versus buying just encourage someone to pay more for a game they already spent money on. It would be different if this was a FTP game. This is just another attempt from “EA” to squeeze money from the customers
-: The AI of the other cars is terrible. It doesn’t match up to what other racing games are putting out.
Verdict for Need For Speed Payback: { 5/10 } { Mediocre }
Need for Speed Payback can be fun at points. The graphics might look good, car engines sound great and having a lot of variety in races to choose from. Unfortunately, it is destroyed due to a dull, embarrassing, overdone and pervasive story. An awful idea of “Speed cards” to upgrade a car, go along with bad writing and boring characters. So is it worth $60 price tag? Absolutely not!
So I would recommend staying away from this game, well technically… stay out of it while it’s going $60. Maybe and just maybe get it if it goes to like $20-30, or just save this money and go get the better game, Need for Speed Most Wanted (2006).
