Game details Developer: Ghost Games

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Platform: Windows (reviewed), Xbox One, PS4

Release Date: Nov. 10, 2017

ESRB Rating: T for Teen

Price: $60

Links: Origin | Official website Ghost Games: Electronic Arts: Windows (reviewed), Xbox One, PS4Nov. 10, 2017T for Teen: $60

Despite being an overall fantastic year for games, 2017 has brought some real lemons in the racing world. Need for Speed: Payback should have been poised to flip that narrative. The once-annual series had a year off to center itself and looked like it was leaning into a promising premise—a Fast and Furious-like tale of professional car thieves/street racers. The stars seemed downright aligned to light the way for Need for Speed’s comeback.

Unfortunately, even next to relatively weak Gran Turismo and Forza releases, Payback might just be the worst major racing game this year. It's certainly the worst Need for Speed in some time, which is saying something given the series’ own flailing in the last few years.

Sanitary revenge

The game’s issues begin almost immediately, with the revenge plot that gives Payback its name. It's an almost comically low-stakes setup in which one member of a gang of five street-racing heroes betrays the others over a Koenigsegg Regera (that’s a fancy sort of car). Nobody dies, goes to prison, or is grievously hurt over it. The betrayed gang members just get different jobs—as a getaway driver, mechanic, valet, and stunt driver for YouTube celebrities, respectively.

That indignity is apparently worth the gang getting back together and plotting life-or-death raids against “The House,” a vaguely criminal organization that wants to rig all gambling in Fortune Valley (aka “Fake Las Vegas”). All such raiding involves street racing of some form or another, because that’s what a Need for Speed must be about, regardless of any seemingly unrelated MacGuffins the plot wraps around it.

The basics should be familiar at this point. Payback, like the last few years’ Need for Speed games, co-opts its formula from the too-long-dead Burnout series. You drift through corners carved out of an open-world to earn boost, then liberally apply said boost in the straightaways.

In fact, you earn boost (slowly) whether you drift or not, meaning you can use it almost constantly regardless of how well you turn. You need to lean on the boost, too, because most races sport some very noticeable rubber-banding. Sometimes I would finish a race in second place, only to improve my time on the next attempt and end up finishing in sixth. Thus, personal speed and improvement in any given race becomes less important than just working around your AI opponents. Silly strategies, like hanging onto a full tank of boost for the final straightaway, become necessary to counter last-second sneak attacks from artificially inflated AI.

Grinding gears

Gaming the system that way isn’t nearly as satisfying as shaving seconds off a run, either through repetitive training or fine-tuning your vehicle. If anything, it made me want to pause and restart every event the second it became clear I’d already “lost” one lap in. Yet I almost always went through the motions, finishing races I had no hope of winning, just so I could take the cash reward for third or fourth place before trying again.

That’s because in-game money accrues excruciatingly slowly in Need for Speed: Payback. It’s a problem that plagues just about every inch of the game.























Let’s start with the progression. Every car is situated with a score determined by loot drops you’ve equipped to that vehicle (à la Destiny’s Light Levels). These “Speed Cards” are acquired by taking first place in events or from vendors which sell random, rotating stocks. Every event, in turn, has a recommended level you more-or-less need to hit in order to be competitive.

Most Speed Cards cost about two first place wins worth of cash. And since every new event in a given category (street races, off-road races, drift challenges, etc.) has a higher recommended loot score than the last, there’s a lot of grinding required to remain competitive.

What’s worse is that Speed Cards also determine cars’ handling, braking power, top speed, and other tuning properties. That means the way you customize your ride’s performance is determined by an almost totally random process, rather than allowing you tinker to your liking. Plus there’s no guarantee a particular piece of loot will be useful. If you get a card with a braking power perk that’s useless for your drag racer, you still might end up using it because the higher gear level will magically make you more competitive against the AI.

How’s my driving?

Even with the annoying randomness, a loot-driven system like this wouldn't be too bad if Payback's cars handled well to begin with. They don't. Drifting is particularly fiddly. There's no way to straighten out or redirect yourself through a drift, so off-road and otherwise drift-heavy cars constantly feel out-of-control. You can rely on tighter-turning classes, like dragsters and racers, but these are all but unable to find traction or gain speed in off-road races. And in the digital Fake Las Vegas, there's a lot of off-roading.

And aside from a few story missions, every major event in Payback requires a specific type of vehicle: off-road races need off-road cars, drift challenges need drift cars, and so on. The game supplies you with the basics but quickly requires you to find your own contenders for future missions. That means grinding and blowing more money on new classes of car (or spending ages hunting for derelict vehicle parts). Then you still need to spend even more money on more random Speed Cards to juice those up, too.

Those are the biggest currency sinks, but not the only ones. It also costs cash just to fast travel to most valid locations and even more to unlock some of those same waypoints. You can customize a car’s look with decals, paint jobs, and parts you unlock by reaching certain milestones, but you still need to cough up more money to equip them. That even applies to cosmetic items you earn out of loot boxes.

Ulterior motors

Oh, yes, there are loot boxes. Strangely, though, Payback doesn’t draw as much attention to them as you’d think. It actually took me several hours to realize I was earning free ones every time I leveled up my driver (which is still too slow to offset the constant “verge of bankruptcy” feeling by very much). Of course, you can always just spend real, human cash for a crack at premium boxes full of the same cosmetic items, as well as scrap to exchange for Speed Cards and chunks of in-game cash.

Payback is a constant push against poverty. You spend money to claw your way toward competitiveness to unlock worthwhile competitions, to earn more money to claw your way to the next one. That makes it extremely disheartening to discover there’s a mercenary option to just buying your way through the entire process. Even if the game wasn’t balanced to push me toward microtransactions (and it certainly feels like it has been), it would be impossible to shake that icky, manipulated feeling.

The one dubious upside of Payback’s poor package is that I never felt even slightly inclined to bother with a loot-box purchase. Need for Speed: Payback comes up so short in every aspect that I don’t even want to push through it, much less pay for the privilege.

The sanitary, self-serious story is laughable—filled with people trying to authentically deliver lines like “I had to dance with the Grim Reaper herself,” or act in genuine awe of an “anarchist hacker street racer.” Speed Cards would suck most of the joy out of min-maxing vehicles even if the driving was good enough to support such tinkering in the first place. And the open world is so choked by the grind to unlock meaningful events that it might as well have been a linear series of missions.

I’m not sure what the future holds for Need for Speed. The games have been in a rut these past few years, but apparently even an extra year of development and a relatively open playing field in the racing genre wasn’t enough to rock it loose. I am sure, however, that Payback will go down in history as one of the weaker entries in the already ailing series.

The good

The resurrected Burnout formula of drift, boost, repeat is still solid.

Some players might appreciate having a little more story in their racing game—even a bad one.

The bad

Worst-in-class story and writing.

Mediocre-to-bad car handling, depending on which car you try to drive where.

Random loot drops make tuning cars a pain.

The entire game is a slow grind for in-game cash... unless you’re willing to pay.

The ugly

“Anarchist hacker street racer” as an unironic, spoken character description

Verdict: Need for Speed: Payback is a fruitless, grind-y, hard-to-control drive through a terrible story. Skip it.