No more darting down random side-streets at the last second to shake the fuzz, or parking in a dimly-lit area with the engine off, like Need for Speed 2015. Taking down cop cars in these events has a welcome enough Burnout 3 flavour 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. “The cop chases feel largely neutered too escaping police is now a totally linear exercise, where we have to follow a set path via checkpoints within a time limit instead of improvising and doing something unpredictable to throw them off. They’re really just built to service Payback’s paper-thin story, which starts with a confounding succession of betrayals and ends without ever really going anywhere interesting. Fast and frantic, but shallow and not worth replaying. They’re well-executed, particularly how they seamlessly swap you between characters and vehicles (like the opening moments of Forza Horizon 3), but they’re completely scripted. We’re just driving from cutscene to cutscene. They may look exciting on the surface, but they aren’t really that demanding unlike, say, the Stuntman games, Payback doesn’t require us to do any of the trickier stuff ourselves – the game takes over all the cool bits. The reality is that racing still pads out the bulk of the driving in Payback and the new “action driving” stuff is limited to a small handful of movie-inspired sequences and Payback’s new police pursuit system. You may have heard that Payback has dialled back on the pure street racing focus in favour of a self-described “action driving” experience. But elsewhere? Well, unfortunately, Payback has gambled and lost. Plus, the world is filled with extra activities and events, drag racing is included from the get-go, and yes, you can pause it. There’s a much longer experience here – it took me around 17 hours to complete the story alone. Of course, it was very short, the world was largely empty, there initially wasn’t any drag racing, and you couldn’t even pause the game in single-player. Between all the hokey live-action, first-person fist-bumping it also revolved around encounters with real-world automotive icons.
You see, Need for Speed 2015 brought with it a resurrection of the spirit of 20’s successful Underground games and saw the return of meaningful performance and visual customisation. While Payback does fix a host of the 2015 Need for Speed reboot’s missteps, it also brushes away a lot of the stuff developer Ghost Games got right at that time.
Need for Speed Payback is one step forwards and two steps back for EA’s 23-year-old racing series.
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