Instead of worrying about how tight to slalom down one of Payback’s serpentine freeways, I’m thinking about how the turns of this world feel mundane when compared to the cartoonish curves of Burnout: Paradise. Instead of working out whether I should save my nitrous for fourth or fifth gear, I’m comparing the signage of Payback’s fake Subway sandwich shop to the ones I remember from The Crew. Instead of trying to win, I’m trying to parse: What is this, specific race car fantasy?

In the late hours of the night, as I drift down mountain highways and shift into high gear on Need for Speed: Payback’s straight aways, the controller disappears from my hand. The car and the road and the checkpoints and the other racers do, too. This isn’t unique to Payback; this happens whenever I play even the most average racing games.

The math behind those levels is pretty unclear, but your car’s level is tied at least partially to the collection of parts you have equipped on any given frame, and that’s where Payback begins to show its hand.

The structure of Need for Speed: Payback closely follows the model set forth by 2014’s The Crew, in combining RPG-style stat increases with arcade racing. Every car has a starting level and a max level, ranging from 100-400 (with the early and mid-game vehicles capping out at 300), and every race in the game is listed with recommended level, working as a sort of soft “gate” to your progress. Sure, your level 140 Roadster might be able to take on a field of level 150 opponents if you play very well, but if there’s a 20+ level difference, things get rough.

But underneath the checkpoints and drift scores, Payback peddling something else. Once I started paying attention to the overall structure of the game—to all those hours spent between races trying to keep my cars leveled up—I realized that Payback’s most distinct quality was how it made literal slot machine progression mechanics palatable, not in how it rendered cars going at high speeds. And in a year where major publishers are trying to figure out how to make loot boxes the future of monetization, that is something worth paying attention to.

Every few hours you get to do a story mission, and these at least gesture towards the lovable absurdity of the Fast and the Furious—an early mission even has you taking on a helicopter with a prototype spotlight that can shut down any car it focuses on. Classic Hollywood action movie bullshit.

Unlike Fast and the Furious, the bulk of Payback isn’t focused on surprisingly warm characterization or spectacular set pieces. And unlike the Ballad of Dom and Brian, Payback’s pacing is terrible: Though there are high-intensity missions inspired by action movies, they come few and far between. Instead, you spend most of your time taking on smaller gangs in races across familiar categories (street racing, drifting, offroad, drag racing, and “runner” races—getaways and courier tasks that make up most of your crime-doing), earning “bank” and “reputation.”

On it’s face, that’s an easy to answer question: Need For Speed Payback wants you to feel like you’re running your own version of the Fast and the Furious familia. Set in a fictionalized Las Vegas (and its desert-and-mountains surroundings), you play as a team of roadway criminals determined set out to take down “The House” (a slightly more organized collection of criminals that run the city’s casinos).

After buying a new car from a dealership or finding collectibles that offer you “derelict” vehicles, you then need to spend more time and money getting them up to the task of actually racing by upgrading its component parts. There are six types of parts, each featuring a stat boost and a (fictional) manufacturer—if you equip three parts from any one manufacturer, you get a bonus.

On its face, Payback is just operating from the same playbook as The Crew, which offered an endless flow of non-specific parts that increased your performance. The curve of upgrades so closely mimicked the feeling of becoming more skillful that you may think that it was practice paying off. But if you dropped back down to an earlier, less leveled car, all that precision fell away. At the time, this felt emblematic of a larger shift happening across the landscape of gaming. As I wrote for Paste, it felt like a “prime example of the new power fantasy:”

If, as Rowan Kaiser has argued, the old fantasy was about having power, the new fantasy is about accumulating power. The old power fantasy was invincibility codes and infinite ammo. The new power fantasy is the feeling that you’ve earned your success by your hard work alone. This is the fantasy behind the guitar-riff that signifies that you’ve leveled up in Call of Duty multiplayer. It’s the fireworks and orchestral bombast of Peggle. It’s the steady return on investment in Fantasy Life. It is a power fantasy that reflects our time. We want to be reassured that our effort will pay off in the end, that progress is guaranteed, and that our achievements are fully our own.

The Crew was disappointing for a host of reasons, but I get the appeal of that fantasy. It’s not like I’m fundamentally opposed to “leveling up” in games, and just thinking about Fantasy Life reduces my stress. Our world is filled with inequity, and it is soothing to step into a world where persistence always pays off. “Making the numbers go up” in video games feels good because the problems in our own lives are rarely even reducible to “numbers,” let alone solved with a simple mixture of determination and time. I’m not going to judge anyone who, in a year like 2017, actively seeks respite in games that assure us that we can make things better if we put in the work. The real world isn’t that easy, sure, but as Slim Charles said: If it’s a lie, we fight on that lie.

But Payback takes the structure of that fantasy—consistent, predictable progress—and strips away the feeling that you’re improving at all. And it does this with a slot machine.

Throughout Payback’s campaign, you’ll often face huge leaps in the “recommended” car level listed between missions, which means you’ll need new parts constantly. Finishing a story mission always left me looking at new, higher level activities only to find that I could barely afford to upgrade one of my cars enough to take on the task. And remember, because there are five types of events, you (at minimum) need keep five different cars kitted out.