Need for Speed Payback: Did Ghost Games' gamble work?

So I've finally played Need For Speed Payback (2017). An author's note, I played it on PS4. And got it at Game Stop. Support your brick and mortar game stores people. Anyways, the last Need for Speed I played all the way through was Most Wanted (2005), which I played the shit out of on GameCube.  I played bits and pieces of Hot Pursuit (2010) and Most Wanted (2012), but neither impressed me enough to want to keep going. Like all gamers, sometimes I just put games down, sometimes I play them all the way through. It doesn't necessarily reflect a 1:1 correlation of quality, because to be clear I don't think Payback was a great game, I just found I had the motivation to play all the way through.

Let's jump into it. In Need For Speed Payback you play Tyler Morgan, an inexplicably incredibly white dude who apparently grew up in the Vegas barrio. Sorry, Silver Rock barrio. Silver Rock is Need for Speed's version of Las Vegas, which is a small and fairly indistinct city by Need for Speed standards. Most of the more interesting parts of the map are outside of the city, some winding canyons, long stretches of desert and highway, and a cool area of greenery and mountain terrain way out in the West. But the city has a couple cool little features, some glitzy casinos, a couple extensive construction yards, and some underground areas and alleys to screw around in. The barrio seems to be about one street long and two streets wide, which brings us back to the characters. As I said, you control Tyler Morgan, who drips all the charisma of a C-level actor in a bad sci-fi movie, but also Sean McAlister and Jessica Miller. Sean is a significantly more charismatic, funny character who actually seems to have been written with a personality, while calling Jessica an android would be an insult to the personalities of robots. I'd rather have a roomba in the front seat. Which is a shame, because Jess is written with the barebones of an interesting backstory, and her missions are among the most fun in the game, it's just never explored.

Anyways, the game starts with Ty, Jess, and Mac (that's Sean) doing a job for one Lina Navarro, a childhood friend of the three with some seriously on-point hair. They're tasked with stealing a Koenigsegg Regera (there's only 80 units IRL, and I'm not sure any of them are in America) from "The Gambler" - a smooth-talking man named Marcus Weir who is mostly characterized by his being both a protagonist and antagonist and the best outfits in the game. Ty steals the Regera, Lina takes it from him and sets him up to take the fall (during this event Ty's mechanic - Rav - is injured in some kind of way that's mentioned several times in the game but never elaborated on - which was curious to the author, an ambulance worker), and Ty ends up with his crew scattered to the wind and working off a debt for that same Marcus Weir. Setting you up to drive a hilarious beater during the game's next act - a staple in the Need for Speed series. There's nothing about the story that's particularly interesting, controversial, powerful, or even memorable. Seriously, I had to refer to the wiki article a couple times and I just finished the game.

For a game that was essentially billed as Fast and the Furious in the Need for Speed formula, the rest of the game proceeds pretty much like every Need for Speed before it. You're tasked with building your reputation by beating a number of racing gangs (called leagues) - all themed and introduced by some cute little cutscenes - in order to make it all the way to the "Outlaw's Rush", some sort of major racing event that's coming to Fortune Valley. The leagues are beaten by completing a number of races and events culminating in a head-to-head event against each of their leaders, and most of the game is taken up by doing just that. Jess has some interesting missions in which she performs a number of time trials, courier events, and police chases in order to complete undercover assignments for a woman named "the broker". There are some little undertones of corruption and conspiracy here, but it's never explored enough to derive any meaning from it. Also the naming conventions are just annoying, you're doing jobs for "the house" in order to accomplish missions for "the broker" who is trying to bring down "the collector", who ultimately runs "the house", which would like to engage in a hostile takeover of casinos owned by "the gambler". Really? There are the slightest hints of an interesting story here, but that's it.

Other than these themed racing events there are 3 or 4 main missions which are essentially just more elaborate police chase sequences. These are supposed to be the 'fast and furious' missions, one where you chase a truck which is dropping bombs, one where you're trying to escape a helicopter, one where you steal a couple gold-plated supercars. These missions could have been much cooler, but ultimately they're a forgettable, scripted, on rails experience where the game takes control of your vehicle for you at all the coolest moments. It's really a shame, but in Payback the main missions are the weakest by far. Once you've finally beaten all of the leagues and engaged in some surface-level conspiracy-corruption stuff, you get to compete in the Outlaw's Rush, a fun final event that unfortunately only incorporates two of the five car types and takes you in a 3 part race around the entire map. It would have been really cool here if your performance in the first leg carried over into the next leg - I beat the racers on the first leg by like a minute, shouldn't I have been a minute ahead of everyone in the second leg? - but I guess that would have made the event overly easy. The game ends in sort of a reversal of the way it began, and it sets up a sequel that never really happened by giving Marcus Weir a super-cliche post credits scene.

So the story kind of sucked. But I really like the leagues, honestly. They're all themed around their leaders and have some cool little car builds in them. The events are mostly fun, and the banter with the leaders can be amusing if not inspired. I especially enjoyed the Free Ember Militia and NoiseBomb, and some of the league leaders were more interesting than our own characters. Underground Soldier, for example (what a name), or Gallo Rivera of Silver Six. A game about Gallo would have been an actual Fast and the Furious game! The league events were a lot of fun and the events themselves show off a couple different styles of racing that usually wouldn't be split up like this, which I kind of liked. Highway races, for example, the kind of long races around big, easy ring highways have always been one of my favorite Need for Speed staples, and here they basically get their own league - the One Percent Club. Smartly, it's near the end of the game's progression, so I got to enjoy taking my super-fast race build around Fortune Valley's ring highway system.

Each of the leagues is devoted to one type of car-build. There's Race, Off-road, Drift, Drag, and Runner (basically Jess's type, fast hardy vehicles that can take a police chase). The Race events weren't really anything to write home about, though as mentioned before I did like the themes their leagues explored. Off-road was a ton of fun, and a lot more difficult, although I might just suck. Drift was huge fun but I found almost overly easy once I built a good drift build, and drag was the closest thing to living a quarter-mile at a time that this game offers. Before each event the game offers you a "side-bet", a challenge you can complete during the race in order to make a lot more money. I found these cool, and usually went for them, sometimes sacrificing my own performance in order to meet a challenge. They were a good idea.

Would you like to know what wasn't a good idea? Basing the whole game's progression and performance customization system around fucking gambling and loot boxes! What on Earth were they thinking? Did EA threaten to kill their mothers if they didn't figure out a way to monetize something that absolutely didn't need to be monetized? Probably. I don't want to get into these so-called "speed cards" except to say it was the worst, most unnecessary, shallow, and in-your-face thing about this game. What a disappointment.

Speaking of disappointments, the police in this game had the same problem as the main "fast and furious" events. They were scripted and on-rails. There are no organic police chases in this game, the closest thing you get are little side activity events that show up in what seems to be preordained locations and trigger a police chase. There are no police just driving around in the world. Police chases are basically time trial events, go through a series of checkpoints before the time runs out and reach the finishing line. It's a shame, because the police are suitably aggressive and fun to disable that the first couple times I did a police chase, it was kind of fun. By the end, it felt repetitive and like a chore. That seems to be the story of this game - a lot of half-baked ideas that fleshed out with some better mechanics could have made for a really cool experience.

The visual editing lets the player create whatever they want - credit here to Mario Zuñiga on Art Station

One really fantastic component of the game was its visual editor. The visual editor in Payback is second to none. I've never felt I had more freedom to edit the wrap or paint scheme on my car than I did here, and I created a couple wraps on my cars that I was really quite proud of. It felt like something out of a much more advanced game - especially considering how terrible the performance editor is. Actual visual parts (like spoilers and hoods) are locked behind some side events on the map, which I thought was a bad choice, but later in the game I found I had unlocked all the visual parts without really trying to. Hopefully Need for Speed keeps up this level of visual customization in the future. The game also boasts a wide variety of cars among all five of its classes that I didn't even begin to explore during my playthrough, which I also appreciated.

The mechanics of the driving itself are arcade-y and fun, it's no simulation racer and nor should it be. I had a lot of fun sliding all over the roadway with an easy ability to drift in every class but drag, and the cars felt weighty enough to matter but light enough to hit the speeds the game told me I was hitting. Each class feels just a bit different and I appreciated that too. As I mentioned before, off-road was by far my favorite kind of racing, with a ton of bumps and turns that were really fun to master once I figured out you could kind of control the car mid-air. Overall the driving mechanics created a fun, easy experience that was only ruined sometimes by the aggressive AI of other racers. It felt like an escape to play, as it should.

I've been talking about the five different classes of cars, but there's actually one more. The sixth class was added in the only story/gameplay DLC the game has: Speedcross. Speedcross is like a combination of drift and off-road which occurs on constructed tracks which defy reality and evoke the skate park or BMX event. They look like they'd be a ton of fun on motorbikes. The game offers about a dozen speedcross events and a barebones story that's just as forgettable as the main story - involving taking on the main speedcross champion named barracuda or something like that. Speedcross events were incredible fun, and the game provides you with a preconstructed speedcross build so you can jump right into them. If you enjoyed the game at all, I highly recommend the Speedcross DLC.

That just about wraps this up. The game is fun, no doubt, and doesn't require too much investment to complete, but offers more than enough content to feel worthwhile. If you like arcade racers, you'll probably find something to enjoy here, just be warned you'll probably find something to dislike too. I'm currently playing Need for Speed Heat, a game that with a couple hours under my belt so far feels much more impressive, and I'll write a review of that when it's completed. Until then, keep living life like Dominic Toretto. Or maybe don't.

Verdict:

• A cliche, uninteresting story that could have been so much more but did set up some cool themed leagues: 2/5 
• Tinny engine sounds but some cool music effects: 3/5
• Fun, arcade-y racing that does the job: 4/5
• Speed Cards 1/5
• Speedcross 5/5 

Final verdict: 3/5