Minty's Review of Payback. Please read before buying.

This is an impartial review from a gamer of many years. I have purchased the game Need For Speed: Payback as a result of playing the previous Need For Speed which I found to be a rather good and entertaining game. EA has been in the press for many reasons recently especially regarding the Star Wars Battlefront 2 loot boxes. I won’t let these previous issues cloud my judgement on the game but there does seem to be a correlation with the issues that are cropping up in their games.

I have played the PC version using an Intel i5 6600K OC to 4.5ghz, 16GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum 3000mhz, EVGA Geforce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3, SoundBlaster Z card, Game running from 2 WD Black HDD in Raid 0. Game running at 2560 / 1440

The game is most certainly a good game. I wouldn’t call it one of their greatest games but it is still a good one. Why do I say this. Well there are quite a large number of reasons for this and this is mostly do to quality checking and EA/Ghost. There a bugs in this game, BIG bugs. These bugs wont stop you playing the game as the game is fairly stable as I have yet to have the game crash on me. These bugs of which some are glaringly obvious that the only way they could have been missed is that the person doing the checking was in another room. But I will get on about those later.

The game is very storied and very little about the tuning of the cars themselves. This is apparent in how they have developed this game. I have almost completed the game and have spent many hours playing it. I have given it more than a fair chance in play to impress me. One thing that does impress me are the graphics are excellent running with all settings on Ultra. The shadow quality is brilliant as well as the reflections when you do go around a night.  I do wish the Day/Night cycle took longer as I enjoyed driving around the rural areas at night especially. Driving the cars is very arcade like and in general handle well but the cars all do handle rather generically and there is no real difference in how a car feels from another. Come on EA/Ghost. Namco could do this back in ’95 with Ridge Racer. The open world map is nice and large and can take you a fair amount of time to cross and has a decent amount of variety to it. It should cater to everybody in where they like to drive. The mountains going off-road is fun when you screaming down at over 100mph next to a cliff edge. There is traffic but I would say there should be a lot more especially in the city areas. Its like only there is only a few hundred people live in the entire city with how little traffic there is.  It does allow you to go sliding round without making a fool of yourself. Yet I still managed to do that. Who parked that car there in the parking spot just after a corner needs a word. There are street racers about.

The vehicles are split into various classes: Drag, Race, Off-Road, Drift and Runner.  I say vehicles as there are trucks in this game but they actually serve a purpose here. Most vehicles can be purchased in more than one class but if you want a car to be a Race and you want the same vehicle to Off-Road you will need to buy that car twice. This is not a bad thing as they are completely different tuning setups and some do look slightly different in their different tunes.

Tuning is a big part of the street racer scene that this game stems from. Well I will warn you. Prepare to laugh. There is NO tuning of any of the cars. Literally NONE!!! You cannot adjust your springs for stiffness, turbo boost or anything that can affect your car in any way that will affect your vehicles performance. None whatsoever. I lie there is two things you can adjust. They are the ride height and cambers, but these have no effect other than visual. This will annoy the hell out of a lot of the guys who want to tune their cars to just how they like them. I myself wish there was more that you could do to the vehicles. You do get a gratuitous of body modifications to your vehicles and some of them look really nice. The paint and vinyl options are great.  Some people will be able to create some works of art out there. Performance tuning I regrettably say is an absolute joke. I know I wouldn’t bring up Battlefront 2 and loot boxes. But the performance tuning is loot boxes. To upgrade you car you need to get performance cards. Yes cards and not parts.  What is this Might and Magic. The tuning is dumbed down to such a level I could get my mother to do it. It’s a complete joke. Even then you are relying on luck to get the cards you need just to level up your performance rating. You can trade some of these cards in for parts to get more cards. Yes you read that correctly.  Even better you can buy with your real hard earned cash after spending £55+ for the game to get Speed Points, their premium currency to buy shipments which are loot boxes. It gets better. You can buy using those Speed Points standard shipments that only have vanity items, credits and parts for you to buy cards. So in essence you can buy a loot box to access a loot box. Then you can buy Premium shipments which have the same plus 2 Wild cards which are an extra 2 random cards from the standard boxes. I joke you not.

There are some BIG issues with the game other than the loot box system that should have been spotted before the game was released. I have the very strong feeling that EA knowing forced the release of this game when it’s obviously not complete. There is even a good amount of content missing from the game that EA has said and still says on their website that should be there from release. There are actually vehicles missing from the game. The official car list here: https://www.ea.com/en-gb/games/need-for-speed/need-for-speed-payback/news/nfs-payback-car-list specifically states that the following vehicles are in the game for you to purchase and modify. BMW M3 E30 Evo II, Mazda RX-7 Spirit R, Nissan Skyline 2000 GT-R, Plymouth Barracuda, Volvo 242DL and Amazon P130 I can assure you 100% that you cannot purchase and/or modify these cars. I have spoken to an EA representative regarding this and all I could get was they are "coming soon". Yet according to their own website they are in the game to use. Also according to the representative at the time the Lamborghini Murcielago LP670-4 is released tomorrow yet it is already in the game and has been since release. Apparently there were supposed to be missions with the release of that car. Hmmmmm. I smell cover up of a big screw up. The missing content is not limited to missing vehicles. There are even components for car modifications missing such as rear bumpers for the Mazda 2015 MX-5. You can tell this due to some of the rear fenders you can apply. Also some components that are there cannot be fitted to some cars. Particularly the Nissan 180SX has side skirts and fenders that cannot be fitted due to component conflicts that cannot be fixed as the component it requires cannot be fitted as you require the previous component to be fitted first but that cannot be fitted due to not having the second part.

Some of the cars when you modify them have the tyres sticking though the body work.

These issues are across all platforms so its definitely not platform related so I can assure you there has been some fine quality control there. This is the tip of an iceberg I’m afraid.

Another thing the representative said is that there is no date planned for the next patch to fix the known issues so we must keep waiting.

I do feel there is some corporate decisions in the direction that EA are taking in regards to their games and its not a good one. People don’t want to buy a game and then pay to gamble on loot boxes in a game they paid a lot of money for. I got the Deluxe edition and I do genuinely feel ripped off slightly. It's a shame. This game had so much promise from the previous Need For Speed that they have thrown away. It has made me very wary in buying games from EA in the future.

So I would tell anyone who wants to get this game is that yes its good but has major issues and wait till its on sale. Don't pay full price. It's simply just not worth it. The developers, Ghost should have told EA no and refused to release the game until it is ready.

Thankyou

Supermint