Need for Speed Payback Reviews
Enjoyable arcade handling packaged within a game that gets monotonous long before it rewards your time investment.
Need for Speed returns in this, a grossly unremarkable open world racer that marks another step back for the series.
Need for Speed Payback is a big, competent, and confident arcade racer but it's really let down by its linear cop chases, its overwrought and insidious upgrade system, its dreadful dialogue, and its superficial action sequences. It feels fine and it looks flashy, but Payback really went all-in on its direct-to-DVD revenge tale and it was a bust for me.
Need for Speed Payback successfully returns to its Fast and Furious roots with aplomb, but a focus on the grind and a beautiful but empty world means it ultimately falls short of greatness.
This open world has plenty of racing content, but bad progression, technical problems, and throwaway storytelling make it hard to get invested
Need For Speed Payback doesn't do many favors for itself. It's a fun racing game whose flashy story would be fine if I felt like I was building a blinged-out career worthy of it. Instead, I felt driven toward pure stats upgrades, heedless of what the car was or what it looked like.
Dull and uninspired, with a relentless emphasis on grinding, Need for Speed Payback is neither fast nor furious.
Somewhere, Need for Speed Payback makes absolute sense to someone.
EA and Ghost Games set out to make the quintessential Need for Speed by bringing in aspects that worked in the past and has mostly succeeded.
Need For Speed Payback is really very terrible indeed
Need For Speed: Payback may not do anything new, but it brings together elements of Forza Horizon and Burnout Paradise to create a fun and explosive racer.
Need For Speed Payback is the perfect example of one step forward, two steps back. While the world is more beautiful than any of its predecessors, it feels empty in much the same way that the game does. All of the systems seem to be their own worst enemy. Want to build a car? How are you going to upgrade it? Want to customize its looks? You've got to complete unnecessary challenges. Want to progress the story just to see if it gets better? You've got to make sure your car is the appropriate level. All of these things, combined with an unimaginative and frankly boring story result in a racing game that makes it frustrating to race. While there's still the rush of pushing past second place a few meters before the finish line, that rewarding experience is not due to any innovations that the series has made here and the innovations that make this entry in the series unmemorable and unattractive.
Need for Speed Payback tried to do a lot of new things without succeeding in any of them as needed. I have no problem with games get some ideas from each other, which is what the game has done here, which quoted many things from Forza Horizon 3. On the other hand it removed some of the essentials in the franchise, such as the famous cops chases, it is now more like passing through certain checkpoints to escape cops cars. The game also features great cars customization options but offers the worst car upgrade method available in any racing game.
Review in Arabic | Read full review
Predominantly a game that is trying to do too many things at once. Unfortunately, it fails to stand out in any one area.
Need for Speed does not take advantage of the two-year break to present a game that involves a clear step forward in the series, staying as a simple driving arcade that does more things wrong than good.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Once the servers for this game inevitably go offline, with no way to obtain loot boxes, earn speed cards or trade tokens, I can't help but wonder if the casual consumer would genuinely ever have the patience to fully complete this game. Need for Speed Payback is another result of EA meddling in the concept of "games as a service" and taking an otherwise mediocre entry in the series and completely butchering it in the process to achieve this goal.
Despite it's flaws, I still found Need for Speed: Payback quite a likeable arcade racer. Just having a narrative sets it apart from the other, more serious offerings this year, even if it's not delivered with much panache. Sadly it's attractive visuals, and alternate take on the genre, can't disguise a gamut of poor design decisions, some of which serve to make the enjoyable racing less than enjoyable.
In an effort to adopt the stylings of other popular, open-world racers, Need For Speed: Payback presents some fun ideas with poor execution.
The worst Need For Speed game of the modern era, that leaves no stone unturned in its attempts to make itself as boring, repetitive, and exploitative as possible.