A Bag of Subtle Surprises
Payback surprised me in a lot of ways, especially since it’s so much different from NFS: Rivals, its predecessor and also the last NFS game I played. Rivals was all about racing, and Payback is, too, but Payback offers so much more. First off, the cop – racer rivalry has been lightened up a little to make way for rivalry between the racers themselves. Next, we don’t have action tech like EMPs or shockwaves, just the old-fashioned car knockouts. Most importantly, we have a bunch of characters who actually feel like characters and who help make up a story that is much more fleshed out than Rivals.
The story begins with a small racing crew
of three – Tyler, Sean and Jess - who are pitted by circumstances against an influential
racing faction called The House. This faction fixes races, plays dirty, has
deep connections everywhere and believes in rigging the outcome in its favour
by hook or by crook. The rest of the game is made up of how Tyler and co.
manage to bring the House down. It’s not very impressive, but it’s a good try. By
and large, the whole game feels like a Fast and Furious movie, with even some high-octane, action-packed heist missions popping up every now and then, something
I haven’t seen before in the handful of NFS games that I’ve played. Payback is
the most movie-like game I’ve come across in the series so far.
“Gotta love offroading.”
Aesthetics and Customizations
Visuals are great, and to savour the same, a
photo mode is introduced for the first time in the series, I think. As far as I
can remember, Rivals didn’t have a photo mode. Well, Payback does, and I went
to town with it. Check out the screenshot showcase here. Against the scenic
environments and with the decent processing effects offered in the photo mode, the
player can easily end up spending quite a bit of time capturing screenshots. All
the cars look really cool, especially the ones unlocked at later stages. I
managed to get my hands on a Lamborghini Huracan and felt immensely rich, for
some reason, as if I actually owned it. Keep dreaming, me.
After buying a car, first thing that most
racers would do is customize it. As far as visual customizations go, Payback
provides a lot of options. You can modify every single part on the car’s body,
even the music system! You can add decals, scale them, rotate them, change
their position, anything. Although it couldn’t have hurt to add some more
designs and shapes to the decals library but still, you could spend a lot of
time decorating your car’s exteriors. Compared to this, the performance
customization part takes a huge beating.
Cards for Parts
Unlike some previous NFS entries, you cannot install the engine, brakes or transmission of your choice; you have to buy cards. Yep, cards that can be equipped to customize your car’s performance, affecting the speed, brakes, nitrous and other characteristics. Each card has a brand and matching brands in your car’s portfolio boosts a particular characteristic. Obviously, it’s nowhere near as good as driving your car into a garage and installing the parts of your choice, and it will very much disappoint automobile fanatics, but I don’t think people who are in it just for the fun of racing would mind much. I didn’t, and that’s because the other aspects of the game were enjoyable enough for me.
The driving is smooth, the world feels good
to drive around, the story is fairly at par and, to be honest, there’s only so
much story one would expect out of a racing game. At least it’s not boring,
thanks to some great voice acting, and thankfully it doesn’t go overboard with
its action sequences like the latest entry of Fast and Furious – if you haven’t
watched it, thank your stars and stay away from it.
Got some tunes stuck in my head
Special appreciation for the playlist. Great selection, and some nice tunes to drive around to, but they start feeling repetitive sooner than expected, despite the number of songs in the roster. They can also get a bit distracting sometimes. I had to turn the music off for a while to focus on the races. Still, these are songs that most people wouldn’t mind listening to again and again. In fact, some of these are so well chosen that you would want them to play in your own car while you're driving on the highway on a sunny day. Although one side effect of listening to such catchy tunes over and over is that they remain in your head a long time after you exit the game. A couple of my favourites are Dark Days by Local Natives (Sofi Tukker Remix) and Evolution by Syd Arthur.
A lot still remains to be done after
finishing with the main story, which makes up for roughly 40% of the overall
content. And it’s worth doing, if not for the satisfaction of completing
everything, then for collecting money to buy a Koenigsegg Regera or an Aston
Martin Vulcan, and then capturing them against picturesque backdrops.
Personally, I have a sizable dearth of funds in the game to buy those super
cars at the moment of writing, but maybe I won’t remove Payback from my library
just yet. Maybe I’ll keep replaying races every few days and get my hands on
those coveted cars someday, and on that fateful day the NFS Payback screenshot showcase is going to see a significant number of additions.
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