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My Thoughts on Need for Speed Payback [PC Version]

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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.”

 There are 4 modes of racing in Payback – racing itself, offroad, drift and drag. Oh, and there’s also something called runner missions, which is not so much racing but getaway driving, getting VIPs away from cops, that sort of thing. Overall, the driving is smooth and as a far-from-perfect racer, I found drifting and controlling cars in this game a lot easier than others. Except the offroad races; those gave me quite the headaches. Offroading in this game is, well, it’s difficult, to say the least. The cars just refuse to turn sometimes, at other times they break into an uncontrollable drift and take forever to recover. They jump, land, crash and fall off cliffs like giant Hot Wheels cars. Sean, the offroad guy of the trio, often exclaims – “Gotta love offroading!”. Looking back at my experience, though, I think he was just being sarcastic.

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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