Need for Speed™, one of the world’s bestselling video game franchises,
returns with a vengeance in the new action-driving blockbuster, Need for Speed
Payback. Set in the underworld of Fortune Valley, you and your crew were
divided by betrayal and reunited by revenge to take down The House, a nefarious
cartel that rules the city’s casinos, criminals and cops.
Need For Speed Payback sees the long-running franchise return after a two year-long absence. The last entry acted as a bit of a reboot and saw things shift from open-world racing to more of a narrative-driven structure complete with live-action footage mixing in with game models. Prior to the release of Need for Speed Payback I made a joke how this could be NFS Refund or NFS Retrovizor. After I invested more time in that game than she deserved, I think it would be better to be NFS Payoff. Namely, everything in the new NFS is about paying. For every possible thing, even the most ridiculous, the game pays you some points.
Need for Speed Payback is the kind of arcade racer that never requires you to lift your foot off the accelerator. Its brazen drifting is effortlessly achieved with aggressive cornering and feathering the brakes, and judicious bursts of nitrous are your best friend down any stretch of open road. There are few games of its ilk nowadays, but perhaps Payback points to a reason why. Despite its impressive visuals and contemporary trappings, Payback's pick-up-and-play driving model harkens back to Need for Speed Underground and its Fast and the Furious-inspired street racing. Yet, unlike the series' heyday, Payback's arcade sensibilities aren't enough to save the game surrounding it from wallowing in mundanity.
The game is following an unfavorable serious story about revenge, which is told by characters who are charismatic like their pumped cars. The same action takes place through several missions in which you drive a “furious car", usually someone else, and do some crazy things on the Fortune Valley Roads. To be more precise, those crazy stuff performs more often through animation, which is why the action in NFS is quickly lost of adrenaline. For example, you must approach the truck to steal the car from it. Instead of driving and trying to keep up with a truck while your friend is trying to jump on him, in Payback, it's enough to get closer to the truck and the game will do everything else through the animation.
Instead of a car, in Payback, you randomly win a speed card for nitro, brakes, jumping, and so on. Each card has its own level and manufacturer, so if e.g. pair of several of the same manufacturers you get a certain bonus. The system does not escape the fact that it is designed to cause the player to charge extra through microtransactions. You will get the best speed cards if the ones won on races are replaced by the tokens, and you use these tokens for the machine where you win new speed cards. So, literally automatic - like in a casino.Of course, tokens can also be bought with real money, and if you're wondering why you should do this, here's the answer. If you do not want to conquer the speed card, you have the option to use the bad ones you get on races or buy a new ones with virtual currency in the Tune-in store. The point is that this trade does not have a permanent repertoire but the offer changes every ten minutes. So if the store does not have the upgrade you need to be competitive in the next race, you still have to wait for ten minutes and hope that after that in the inventory you will find the one you need. Or, of course, instead of waiting you can give some real money to guarantee that you will immediately get something that will surely use you.
The most interesting part of the game are the Derelict vehicles that you have to find on the map and then bring them in driving condition by discovering their parts. Vehicle locations and parts are not shown accurately on the map, but you have to identify where to find them yourself, which gives interesting "detective" sense to the exploration. When I think a little bit better, do you know why this is the most interesting part of the game? Because it has nothing to do with micro-transactions and that vehicles you can not buy by tipping extra money, but you have to do it yourself. From an audio perspective, the game definitely goes for less music and more dialogue – so whether you want to or not, you’ll hear music mixed in with a lot of story exposition between missions. The acting is fine, but nothing amazing – with everyone fitting their characters well enough. Smarmy folks are smarmy, your everyman character sounds beaten down by The Man, and your boss is a grade-A jerk at all times. There isn’t much depth, but for what the game is trying to do, the acting works reasonably well. The car-crashing and siren sound effects work nicely though, and when you have frantic car chases, everything clicks into place from an AV perspective with red and blue lights swirling around and chaos with cops calling you out alongside the sirens.
Need for Speed Payback's banal racing is only magnified by this focus on grinding. The simple, almost retro, handling model provides occasional bouts of fun, but it's never enough to escape Payback's flaws, with an unwillingness to let you partake in its most hair-raising moments, and a general drabness that seeps into every layer of the game. Need For Speed Payback isn’t perfect – but it’s a nice step up from prior entries. Outside of Rivals, the series has really struggled over the past five or so years to really find its own way. The FMV-filled reboot wasn’t the right answer, and going for an action movie-styled variant is great for an ad campaign – but doesn’t make for a great campaign itself. Fortunately, the racing action and cop chases that litter the campaign make it worth playing. It looks great in motion, even if the action doesn’t hold up very well. The cop chases are exciting and the point-to-point races bring a level of arcade-style thrill that the series definitely benefits from.
