It’s like your own tattoo parlour, except on cars instead of people. Players can spend hours painting and stickering their vehicles with all manner of garish decals and street art. It’s still one of the best systems out there. Props must go to the degree of visual customisation options available for the vehicles in the game.
This may not be a huge issue to some, but it personally impeded my ability to enjoy the gameplay at times which was slightly disappointing. I did notice some aggressive texture and object pop-in during my time with the game, however, which resulted in sections of the track not loading fast enough while racing. The game also runs at a relatively solid 30fps on PS4, which seems par for the course for an arcade racer.
There are no dynamic weather conditions, but there is a full day/night cycle. The open world of Fortune Valley is well realised but can feel very empty, like the game’s 2015 predecessor. They do, however, showcase some impressive damage modelling, although the effect on the car’s performance in-game is minimal if any. Vehicle models are well detailed but fall short of the obsessive attention to detail in games such as Gran Turismo Sport and Project Cars 2. Players coming into Payback expecting these sequences to be the bulk of the game will walk away very disappointed. Unfortunately, while they’re great fun, they are far and few between. Usually, all three characters will participate in these events, and the game will chop and change perspectives during the race (think the heist missions from Grand Theft Auto V). They were featured heavily in Payback’s marketing materials and are very cinematic and well-directed. These are a combination of narrative-based missions with racing and cop chase elements combined. There are also some set piece “action driving” events scattered throughout the game. The other race types fall somewhat in between but do little more to push the boundaries of racing games. Basically, a case of quantity over quality. It really feels like a desperate attempt by EA to add more content to the game without adding much. The courier/cop chases are the most mundane and sometimes amount to little more than fetch quests. The racing is tight and your typical Need for Speed arcade-y handling features heavily (more on this later). By far the most fun of these race types are the traditional races. Payback features five distinct race “types” – traditional racing, outroad races, courier/cop chases, drift races and drag races. Lastly, there is Jessica, a lady with connections to the criminal underworld and who you’ll use for the courier/cop chase events. Then there is Mac, a ladsy Brit who you’ll play in the drift and offroad events. There is Tyler, who is your typical sombre male character and who does the racing events. Players can assume the role of one of three distinct characters. Payback is once again developed by Ghost Games and is set in the open world of Fortune Valley.
At its core, Payback is a fun game that features a lot of tight racing action, but it’s also sadly let down by its tedious progression, upgrade system and terrible dialogue. This finally brings us to Need for Speed Payback, which is the latest entrant in EA’s longstanding franchise. The last entry, 2015’s Need for Speed, was developed by Ghost Games and appeared to recapture the spirit of the Underground games, though it was far from perfect and lacked some basic features – like a pause function (seriously). The Hot Pursuit and Most Wanted games (which were, in my opinion, some of the most fun entrants) reintroduced cop chases and long, Outrun-esque sprint races.
The Shift series took the series in a slightly more realistic, track-based direction. The Underground series from the early 2000s embraced street racing and import culture.
The Need for Speed series has gone in different directions over the last decade or so.