Need for Speed: Payback

https://youtu.be/dpNYjDo7oJE

Need for Speed Payback is at its best when you’re completing story missions, speeding through thrilling set-pieces and battling against cops and criminals. It’s even highly entertaining when you’re just belting around its open world, completing activities and engaging in events. But when you hit that brick wall and have to put a halt to your fun for hours at a time in order to raise your car’s performance level, your patience will be tested, and many will decide to simply not bother at all.

Need For Speed Payback takes a narrative gamble, loses.

The need to grind.

2017 is a cracking year for racing fans but unfortunately for Need for Speed, Payback doesn't stand tall amongst the likes of Forza Motosport 7, Gran Turismo Sport, Project CARS 2, DiRT 4 and F1 2017.

Need for Speed Payback is another miss for the franchise.  The racing feels good, the presentation is great, but everything surrounding it is absolutely abhorrent.

There’s a perfectly fine racing game somewhere in this mess of half-baked ideas. A fun arcade racer has been drowned in enough ‘one more thing’ additions to fill the entire run of Columbo, and the result is a rather unpleasant muddle of bland story, stop-start driving, and player control being ripped away just as things get juicy.

Need For Speed Payback is the perfect example of one step forward, two steps back. While the world is more beautiful than any of its predecessors, it feels empty in much the same way that the game does. All of the systems seem to be their own worst enemy. Want to build a car? How are you going to upgrade it? Want to customize its looks? You've got to complete unnecessary challenges. Want to progress the story just to see if it gets better? You've got to make sure your car is the appropriate level. All of these things, combined with an unimaginative and frankly boring story result in a racing g...

Need for Speed Payback is a grind to play both figuratively and literally. Even if you like the arcade racing on offer, it's not worth slogging through the amateur presentation, repetitive missions and microtransaction hooks.

Coupled with a desert city and countryside that feels lifeless despite being packed with racing challenges and collectibles, it’s the equivalent of a bland paint job surrounding a high performance engine block. Considering how little I customized my cars in Need For Speed Payback, much less wanted to, that’s the best epitaph I can give it.

I cannot fathom what Ghost are doing with the Need For Speed series. The introduction of smashable billboards (although not of course those with real-world advertising on them) seems like a hark back to the glory days of Criterion, but the repeated punch in the face that is the storyline and quest structure seems like something unwanted in either the Burnout or Need For Speed worlds. It's such a ghastly game, not because of its weakly driving, but because of every single other thing it does to get in the way of it.

Republished on Wednesday 30th September 2020: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of October's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows.