Need for Speed has taken its adrenaline-fueled attitude in a number of different directions over the years.
It’s been outright cartoony, semi-realistic,
and it often attempts to be more cinematic.
Need for Speed Payback continues with a familiar open-world format and a half-hearted story,
but it’s the gamble on a card-based progression system that breaks the bank.
Perhaps as an attempt to justify the dice rolls, Payback’s story is set
in a Vegas-inspired region called Fortune Valley.
The urban center is filled with casinos,
and you’ll interact with a cast of characters with names like The Collector, The Broker, and The Gambler.
Your story begins with a crew of car thieves looking for revenge,
which soon snowballs into a plan to take down The House,
a criminal syndicate that’s not only rigging street races,
but is so influential as to have the cops on their payroll.
The game starts on bad footing with a long-winded opening that’s packed with cut-scenes.
It doesn’t trust the player to participate in the big cinematic moments,
pulling away control and making you watch instead.
While the truck chase highlighted for the game’s reveal
suggests a series of impressive heists, these moments are few and far between.
Of the three playable characters, Mac and Tyler
spend most of their time simply competing against regional street racers.
Jess gets into more cloak and dagger stuff, acting as a getaway driver, going undercover,
and outrunning the cops, but the game lacks the smart setups needed to deliver a great payoff.
At the core of Need for Speed Payback is a card-based progression system
that degrades nearly every aspect of the game.
Each car you drive is rated at a level determined by its base stats
and a series of cards equipped in slots such as the exhaust, block, and gearbox.
Every race has a recommended car level, and that number quickly ratchets up,
requiring you to upgrade your car on a regular basis.
You’ll win a card after each race,
but you’ll need to get most of your cards from tuning shops
which have random selections of cards for sale.
If those cards don’t raise your level enough,
you’ll have to wait 10 minutes for the shops to reshuffle.
Alternatively, you can recycle old cards into part tokens used to craft new cards.
The trick is that it takes three parts to craft a new card,
which is done via a slot machine that bestows stats at random.
So you could spend all your resources and still end up with dud cards.
This is where shipments come in – as you level up, you’re rewarded with shipments
that include cash, cosmetic items, and a handful of part tokens.
Shipments can also be bought outright using real money,
essentially giving you the ability to pay for more chances to spin the wheel
in the hope of getting better cards.
Aside from the inherent problems of microtransactions and loot boxes,
Need for Speed’s card system can completely halt progression altogether.
Cards can only be used on the car that you buy them for,
and every car has to be gradually raised from low level cards to high level cards.
This can leave you stuck,
spending resources to roll the slot machine over and over just for cards that will be replaced with better cards
moments later.
If you’re out of parts, you can easily find yourself sitting around for half an hour or more
watching shop timers run out,
as each 10 minute shuffle has the potential to deliver a set of duds.
This is all for the sake of simply participating the next race,
and it’s a tedious waiting game that makes the prospect of buying new cars feel completely unappealing
as you imagine having to start the cycle all over from scratch.
With the urge to get moving, you end up not building cars with the strengths that you want,
but instead just go with whatever will raise your rank enough to move on.
Plus it’s easy to find yourself over-leveling
just so you can do a few races in a row without having to look at the shop for a bit.
When the game actually lets you play, there are things to like.
The open world primarily consists of desert, canyon, and mountain regions, as well as the city.
Bounding across the hills is fun on its own,
and you can tackle minor objectives like jumps, speed traps, and billboards to smash.
There are roaming racers that you can approach and challenge,
but unless you’re going out of your way to do so, it can be easy to miss them until you’re far above their level.
Payback takes a few pages from Forza Horizon as well, the most obvious being derelicts.
After defeating certain crews,
they’ll provide you with maps to derelict cars hidden in the world.
Spotting the locations is a bit easier than in Forza,
but you need to hunt down five parts to assemble each car,
and many of the parts are in hard to reach locations.
Once you assemble a derelict, you can build it into any class that you like,
and the body remains rusted unless you replace those parts in the garage.
Speaking of classes, Payback’s vehicles and events are split among five distinct styles:
race, offroad, drift, drag, and runner.
Each chapter of the story has you doing quest lines in most of these categories,
completing a series of races against some of the regional crews
or doing a group of spy jobs to investigate The House.
The race and offroad categories are the game’s bread and butter,
with offroad events proving to have more interesting routes and big jumps.
The car setups in each category certainly feel different,
particularly when it comes to drifting, but the dedicated drift cars feel almost automatic
as sliding through drift events takes little effort.
Drag races, meanwhile, require you to rocket straight ahead, dodging cross-traffic
and shifting at the right times to build your nitrous.
As for runner events,
the cop chases in Need for Speed Payback are fairly unsatisfying.
They do get tougher and more aggressive by the end, but through most of it,
cops get taken out like tissue paper and easily fall behind.
Multiplayer is straightforward, allowing you to compete across sets of five races with 4 to 8 players
in either casual or ranked playlists.
All the car ratings and cards carry over from single-player,
and this is where the pay to win issues come into play.
Even if your car is at the same level as your opponent,
the individual stats can vary dramatically,
and more rolls of the slot machine means more chances to max out perks.
Since ranked play requires cars rated at 300 or above,
it’s super-fast and a bit messy as opponents wipe out in front of you or slam you from behind.
You just have to embrace the chaos, and races can swing between being frustrating
if you repeatedly slam into walls or head-on traffic,
or they can be exhilarating when you manage to thread the needle through all of it.
For all of the randomness involved in multiplayer, the ranking system seems rather harsh.
If you place well, you’ll gain points towards a higher rank,
but if you finish in the lower half of the group, points will be subtracted from your rank.
It can be demoralizing to work your way up to rank 2,
only to be kicked all the way back to the beginning of rank 1,
simply because you went against some tougher players or
fell victim to a series of wrecks outside of your control.
Playing on a standard Xbox One, we encountered noticeable pop-in while driving on some roads,
as well as a few minor bugs and errors – some that are quite humorous.
The most troubling problem comes as a result of putting the console into sleep mode.
When resuming the game from this state, traffic stutters unpredictably or
spawns without any AI or collision.
Thankfully, the fix is as simple as resetting the game each time you play, but it is a slight hassle.
While it may not do anything groundbreaking,
there’s a decent game buried somewhere in Need for Speed Payback.
It’s hard to deny the fun that still comes from sliding through mountain switchbacks or
launching through the air like a rocket.
However, the promise of pulling off epic heists falls flat,
and Payback is crippled by its progression system.
A car’s performance shouldn’t be determined by a slot machine,
and a racing game shouldn’t force you to wait out in the parking lot.
Easy Allies Reviews are made possible by generous viewers just like you.
If you like what you see, check out patreon.com/easyallies to see our other videos
and consider becoming a patron to help us make more.