Need For Speed Payback

PC, PS4, Xbox One

There’s a moment quite early in this 23rd Need For Speed title in which the writing and racing meld together, and the promise of a narrative-focused driving game bears fruit. Struggling for employment after his crew disbands, Mac the drift racer earns a crust by taking people on ‘driving experiences’ in which he throws a car around some corners while they scream. One such client is a YouTube ‘influencer’ who speaks more to his viewers than he does to Mac, demands selfies every six seconds, and appears to be cosplaying as Kid Rock. So when our passenger begins to feel quite nauseous during the drift challenge, we suddenly feel a tremendous impetus to drive quickly and aggressively. Making this oik miserable is so much more compelling than hitting the required drift score.

Unfortunately, this moment serves primarily to show the rest of the game up. All the times that our ‘hero’ Tyler tells people, “I’m the best racer in town” over the radio while driving meaningless checkpoint runs. All the times that Jess, the criminal underground connection, evades the cops or delivers suspicious packages to people via meaningless checkpoint runs. Given that The Fast And The Furious long ago cornered the market for creative endeavours about illegal street racing, Payback was always going to be an uphill struggle for Ghost Games’ writers. But as rare glimmers like that queasy drift challenge demonstrate, it’s not impossible to find personality and humour in these repetitive activities.

Structurally, this is archetypal Need For Speed. Fortune Valley is an open world of minimap markers, each one representing a new race in one of several disciplines. The twisty rural highways and uptown grids work well as venues for the enormous volume of races, drag sprints, drift challenges and – yep – meaningless checkpoint runs, but what they don’t have is any sense of place. Fictional chunks of Americana are the series’ calling card, but it feels as though this iteration’s quasiVegas setting is a missed opportunity. It’s always hard to make a city feel like a city when the streets are entirely devoid of human beings, but the paucity of gaudy casino exteriors and fake pyramids here is criminal. Yet, characterless as they are, these roads can still entertain. Car behaviour is Payback’s strong suit, so much so that it almost puts together a solid counterargument to the many failings that surround it. Not long ago most racing games drove like this, offering wildly forgiving handling that demanded little attention to the brake pedal and more often than not rewarded a tap of it with glorious powerslides. Now this resolutely arcade handling is a rarity, and all the more pleasurable for it. There’s certainly an acclimatisation process as the cars reveal that they can take 90-degree turns without getting the brake pads dirty, but after making the mental adjustments to dislodge the Forza mindset, there’s a lot to like about Payback’s outrageously accommodating vehicles.

However, this isn’t a game about simply being left alone with a car to enjoy its handling. This is fauxHollywood spectacle, a story of three street racers trying to take down a crime syndicate by driving to and fro. As such, many races involve cinematic setpieces and barrages of expository dialogue from opponents. And there’d be a great game in that, if it were given a completely different treatment to Payback. The set-pieces invariably wrench control away from the player during the most spectacular sequences. This doesn’t seem to be a decision imposed by technical limitations; it’s perfectly possible, after all, to render a player-controlled car driving up a ramp or shunting a lorry in realtime these days. Perhaps it felt like the most cinematic approach to lean on cutscenes, but the effect is that of being held at arm’s length to the action, and simply ferrying the car from scene to scene. Central trio Tyler, Mac, and Jess can do little to combat that effect, either: when they’re not reminding each other of recent plot events, they’re reasserting their motivations in movie-poster-tagline terms.

Admittedly, a Need For Speed game doesn’t exactly need to play out like a Fellini film. But it’s a problem in Payback because Ghost Games obviously wants its players to spend a long time in Fortune City. Unlocks and currency are doled out miserably slowly, and each event carries a recommended car-spec level, which is achieved by winning races and earning upgrade-part drops. This aspect of progression alone quickly becomes a grind. Buying, upgrading, and customising cars was once central to the Need For Speed experience: here it feels like hard work between hammy cutscenes. Playing as the game intends, over many hours, the deficiencies in the story only become more grating. It simply doesn’t have anything like the kind of quality to justify the enormous time commitment it demands.

And then there are the performance issues. Driving though an oncoming vehicle is a distinct possibility in Fortune City, and on Xbox One also suffers several freezes in which the game world keeps on moving while our car is frozen in stasis, high-speed effects such as smeared headlight trails hanging in the air. In those moments, locked in place mid-event, you are left to tot up all the modern faux pas that Payback includes in one place. An open world that offers nothing but uneventful journeys between missions; draconian progression doled out loot box by loot box; tin-eared scripting and a wilful disregard for player freedom. Were it not for the driving model, which against all odds remains a pleasure, and desperately rare moments of imaginative mission design, this would be an abject failure. As it stands, it’s simply a serious one.

It simply doesn’t have anything like the kind of quality to justify the enormous time commitment it demands