TechRadar's review system scores games as 'Don't Play It', 'Play It' and 'Play It Now', the last of which is the highest score we can give. However, surely the Need For Speed franchise is now one flop away from a radical reappraisal? If only EA would abandon it in favour of a revival of Burnout. No doubt EA’s marketing machine will kick into overdrive on Payback’s behalf, but those who buy it will surely find it soulless at best, and positively annoying in parts at worst.īut the same could have been said about previous Need For Speed games, which nevertheless shifted millions of units. It is, for example, much less fun to play than Forza Horizon 3, which has been out for a while and can be found cheaply. It will be fascinating to see how well Need For Speed: Payback sells. It's not ideal, and the presence of this element merely smacks of marketing departments looking at how much a young audience is spending on the likes of Hearthstone (something of which Forza Motorsport 7 is also guilty).
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There’s a decent visual customisation engine – performing spectacular moves in the game unlocks spoilers, side-skirts and the like, and you can tinker around with decals and paint-jobs to your heart’s content.īut at the heart of Payback lies its mechanical upgrade system, which takes the form of a trading card game. Not so finely tunedĬustomisation is key to any game that aspires to excite wannabe street-racers, and Payback does contain some interesting customisation systems. Its design by committee at its worst, and its one of the game's biggest problems. But every element of Payback’s open-world can be traced back to another game, like some box-ticking exercise. There are derelict cars to find, which can be customised into absolute beasts. You can earn experience points by racing through speed-cameras, jumping through billboards, catching air off jump-ramps, time-trials along stretches of road, collecting giant chips and racing ghosts of real-life players. The sheer glee associated with the sort of maniacal driving you could pull off in games like Burnout is completely absent from Need For Speed: Payback.Īt least there’s plenty to do in Payback’s open-world, including street racing, off-road racing, drifting and drag-racing missions.
Overall though Payback’s vehicular combat system completely lacks the precision of the one found in the decade old Burnout games. You do get the odd sequence where you must fight off cop-cars, and there's a mechanic which lets you barge into them, sending them off the road into spectacular Hollywood-style pile-ups (although the game doesn’t dwell on those as much as it should). Although the off-roaders have an annoying tendency towards fish-tailing, for the most part the cars are satisfyingly tail-happy and eager to drift, so you can turn in early and back them into corners, Ridge Racer-style. Payback isn’t an intrinsically bad game: its open-world is large and varied, and the cars handle as you would expect in an arcade-oriented game. While the story missions are something to be endured, there’s better news elsewhere: you must grind to unlock each story chapter and, for once, the grinding is the most enjoyable part of a game.
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