Need for Speed Payback Reviews
Boring free-to-play grindfest which for some reason costs $60. There are much better alternatives on the market.
Review in Russian | Read full review
Need for Speed Payback is a travesty of a game. Between 9 minute cycles of waiting at a vendor refreshing so I could buy better parts for my car, flying about a map populated with enough meaningless activities acting as filler, and the atrocious ending, it’s hard to pick out a point where I could say genuinely say the experience was fun.
Ultimately, there's nothing outstanding or innovative enough here: it feels too much like the designers took a bunch of features from other racing games, threw them all into Payback and added a few Hollywood action sequences.
Pay-to-Win and Wait-to-Play do not a Triple-A title make. Final rating: $$$ out of 10
Need for Speed: Payback is fast, exciting and beautiful, with breathtaking landscapes and great looking cars. Unfortunately, the final experience is watered down by a hard to digest progression system that feels like a whole lot of grind, loot boxes and multiple currencies.
Need for Speed Payback is a well made arcade racing experience that is somewhat held back by a terrible progression system.
Get past some of the poor design ideas, which feels more like an EA intervention than anything else, and there’s a really solid, fun arcade racing game here that’s highly enjoyable.
Electronic Arts and developer Ghost Games took a break from the Need for Speed series last year because of various negative feedback and the Need for Speed team decided to go back to the drawing board. Payback features the largest open world than any of the previous Need for Speeds has seen and includes different varieties of racing. The most noticeable change to the 2017 version is the revenge-driven story, which almost mimics car racing movies like Gone in 60 seconds and Fast and the Furious.
Need For Speed: Payback had all the chances to become a good game, but strange physics, boring competitions, a stupid plot and rough graphics spoiled the final impression. Of course, a good soundtrack is still in place, the desert landscapes look atmospheric, but an endless grind that does not give any pleasure, discourages any desire to play further.
Review in Russian | Read full review
Need For Speed Payback is a game lost trying to do everything at once, ultimately giving you an uninspired arcade racing title. It's almost as the franchise forgot the simplest beauty of what it was: a racing game full of speed and its thrills.
The game sacrifices specificity of environment, story, and characterization so as to ensure that the car is king.
Need For Speed Payback is several bad ideas on four wheels, a drab racer whose potential is rear-ended by an underhanded upgrade system and a story that belongs in a direct-to-DVD bargain bin.
Need for Speed Payback squanders its open world on races against rubberbanding AI, linear escapes from a timer instead of the cops, and a broken economy that will leave you grinding for far too long. Throw in a bland story and unlikable characters, and you've got a franchise on a serious downward trend.
Need for Speed Payback is a real-world example of microtransactions gone wrong. As an open world racer, the game's inoffensively average – but when paired with its bafflingly bad progression system, it's frankly an embarrassment. It's scary to think that publishers are quite literally sabotaging their own games in pursuit of a bonus buck or two these days.
Need for Speed Payback is at its best when you're completing story missions, speeding through thrilling set-pieces and battling against cops and criminals.
Payback is good – assuming you're talking about the 1999 film.
Enjoyable arcade handling packaged within a game that gets monotonous long before it rewards your time investment.
Nostalgia alone can’t keep this game afloat and it’s loot crate-like, monotonous system makes Need for Speed Payback feel stale.
The driving and actual gameplay is still fun and well done. There's actually a very good open world racing game in here, it's just bogged down by level progression and needless grinding that is only there to extend the gameplay time and to get people to spend real money to potentially get upgrades for the cars.
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.