After having a blast replaying Hot Pursuit (2010) in its Remastered version, I’ve decided to check what the series have actually been up to in the latest entries. First one up was Need for Speed Payback and I gotta say, the first impressions were very poor. Yet, I did get through the entire game, having played most of the events, so there is something good to it as well. Not much, but it’s not an entirely unfun experience.
Need for Speed Payback is a rather bizarre desire to combine elements from The Run and Most Wanted, but also add in distinctly different classes of cars for different types of events. As such, it has a (terrible) story with (boring) characters that explains every racing event that happens, though at least it lacks QTEs. On top of it, it focuses way too much on the open world, and by that I mean busywork and pointless driving to where the actual race is. And every racing event belongs to a certain class that requires a separate car, so you can’t off-road in a car made for drifting, or do races in a car made for drag racing. Oh and because it’s EA from 2017, almost every aspect of the game is designed for microtransactions and loot boxes, to the point that the setting of the game is a city full of casinos and gambling.
The plot is sadly unavoidable, but at least it has a few decent characters in it. And to be fair, while I still don’t understand the desire to put any storyline in an NFS game, this might be one of the better ones in the series. And luckily, unlike The Run, most of the really heavily scripted sequences happen during situations, where you’re not meant to believe like you’re actually racing instead of going through a scripted sequence. The real events are real and don’t force the “cinematic moments” in just for the sake of it.
The world in the game is, frankly, boring. And despite the technologically advanced visuals, there’s nothing exciting about how the game looks. It doesn’t help that all of the open world busywork is there literally to be busywork and aren’t even remotely fun to do. Apart from a rather curious concept of treasure hunting for unlocking several special cars. You can’t just start a race, you must ride to where it begins and stop. And the amount of fast travel points in the game is far more limited than you might want. So a lot of the time will be spent just driving to where you need to be to play the game.
Not that the game itself is that exciting. Frankly, I was seriously considering dropping it altogether after a few hours, and it wasn’t until I decided to play a separate event sequence about Speedcross on a whim that I got more invested in the game. That whole event bundle is, shockingly, a DLC for the game (available as part of the Deluxe edition), despite being the highlight of the entire game and being far superior to what you get during the mainline. Races range from being boring to being somewhat okay. Off-road races are usually mediocre and sometimes frustrating. Drifting is great and works rather well with the handling in this game. Drag races are some of the worst races I’ve experienced in any racing game. While the special Runner missions sound exciting at first, being focused on escapes and battles against police cars, but in reality turn out to be either boring or just plain frustrating.
Possibly, the biggest thing I could say about the way racing feels in this one, especially after Hot Pursuit Remastered, is that it’s plain, boring and uneventful. Crashing the car still exists, but it’s hard to tell why – you can bump a wall, back up, start riding as if nothing happened and then have a car reset, because apparently that was a crash. There’s no sense of speed or spectacle. Rubber banding doesn’t exist in a conventional sense, as everything seems to be tied directly to, essentially, “level scaling” which in itself is tied to the microtransaction fueled system. So if you are overpowered, you just ride seconds if not minutes in front of everyone else until the finish line. And if you’re underpowered, you might not even have a chance to win (in Drag races it’s literally impossible to win underpowered, no matter how good you are). And handling is just… weird. No class of car feels right, the way drifting is handled is unconventional and sometimes your inputs seem to be just dropped entirely as the car might refuse to turn when you attempt to.
So yes, the gambling stuff. Basically, you have several kinds of “currency”, as in any microtransaction fueled game, and upgrading your car’s performance is tied to special “cards”. Those cards drop randomly, just like your typical lootboxes, after each event. And can be purchased at tune shops. All of them have random attributes and are always just slightly above in level than what you already have. All of the cards are tied just to the car you’re driving and cannot be used by other cars. Oh and also if you don’t see a card in the store that you want, you can try a literal slot machine to win one, that takes another kind of currency. All of these kinds of fake money can be bought with real money, of course. And this entire design sucks and makes the game completely uninteresting. Because, as I said, you must keep up with these upgrades to actually win, but if you spec your car too high (and why wouldn’t you), then no opponent can keep up with you.
Up until the very end, which was super uneventful and uninteresting, I expected this game to have something. Like the surprising fun discovery of Speedcross events. But no. The most fun and well designed events are a few and the game mostly consists of really tedious races and escapes and cutscenes and boredom. There are cool things to be found in Need for Speed Payback, but it’s simply not worth the time and effort it takes to get the best out of this title.
P.S. Oh and Heat has so much exciting visual flair to it, but the gameplay is just so damn mundane. I don’t think the developers understood what makes an arcade racing game fun. They understood the basics of what makes a game like this work. Simplified handling and controls, which could work well with an exciting tense and fast paced gameplay. But then didn’t nail the gameplay at all, so it’s all slow, exhausting and set to the least interesting racing events imaginable. At least it’s not build around microtransactions, I suppose. As if that should be praised and not normal.