Need For Speed Payback Review – Feels Good ‘Till you Look Under the Hood
Need for Speed Payback may look pretty, but it is bogged down by an unimaginative story, an empty world, and a ridiculous loot system that relies on entropy to power up your car.
There’s something about picking your dream car, customizing its looks, and drifting it through the mountains like Sean Boswell in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Finding the corned on a windy-back road or timing your shifts in a drag race down the boulevard feel rewarding and badass. It’s only when you take a deeper look at that customization that you realize you’re not driving around your dream car, but rather, a bucket of bolts–or in this case, speed cards. Welcome to Need for Speed Payback.
Need for Speed Payback starts out with the done-in, albeit title-deserving revenge story of Tyler Morgan and his crew. But from the beginning, lines of dialogue are cringe-worthy and none of the characters seem to be based in any sort of reality. From the moment I loaded on, I could not suspend my disbelief. While a story about twenty-something-year-olds hijacking cars and attempting to somehow supplant a casino doesn’t sound real to begin with, I found myself immediately uninvested in the characters I was playing, the enemies I had to crash my car into, and the Seattle/Vegas hybrid I was trying to save.
I don't blame him. Part of the fun of a car game is to enjoy getting new cars and customizing them. And it feels like the NFSP is just too slow and too grindy to make it worth it. Specially when there's so many other great racing games out there.
MrCoughing November 25th, 2017
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