Need For Speed Payback’s Biggest Issue Is A Lack Of Identity

Need For Speed: Payback

The Need for Speed franchise is one with a huge legacy, even if it has waned significantly over the years. Many gamers will likely recall spending a large portion of their free time taking over the street racing scene in games like NFS: Underground 1 & 2, Carbon and others.

In more recent years, the series has enjoyed its fair share of ups and downs. Criterion’s Need for Speed: Most Wanted was one of the best entries in the series, but NFS: Rivals proved that what goes up must indeed come down. Violently. God, that game was shite.

2015 saw the series return with a focus on returning to what worked in the past: underground street racing at night, sick drifts and being chased by police. Though it was a better attempt than Rivals, it was obvious that EA were frantically grasping at straws to try and capture that lightning in a bottle once again.

This brings us to Payback, which seeks to fuse the street racing we all love with a revenge storyline and cinematic action sequences straight from a blockbuster film. Unfortunately, after getting a few hours with the game via EA Access, it only serves to highlight Need For Speed’s biggest issue: a lack of identity.

You would think that a series with such pedigree would be able to flaunt its own unique personality, but Payback is just a mishmash of ideas and mechanics from other places. There’s nothing here that hasn’t already been done in other games previously.

The biggest victim of this idea borrowing rampage is Ubisoft’s The Crew, which quite frankly isn’t the best game to poach from as that wasn’t particularly good either. At least The Crew 2 has the sense to expand on its premise by adding planes and boats. Need for Speed is merely content with parading around using commandeered concepts.

For starters, Need for Speed uses the same kind of part based loot system that The Crew used, which gave you random performance items of varying quality as a reward for missions, stunts and the like. It was loathed by many as it turned a normal street racing game into an RPG-esque grind for the best gear.

Need for Speed Payback

Need for Speed uses the system to go one step further and shoehorn in a loot box mechanic with real-world money shenanigans – money-grabbing EA have done it again. Sure, you don’t actually get the performance parts, but you do get Gear Tokens which can be traded in for performance parts. It’s essentially the same thing.

Payback also pilfers the class based car system from The Crew. Cars are now part of one of five disciplines, though at least these disciplines are slightly more varied in Need for Speed. Cars are now split between racing, off-road, drifting, drag racing and runners. That last class is for police chases and drawing away the cops.

Despite Need for Speed: Payback improving the car class system (The Crew felt the need to have both street and track racing), it’s still a system that we’ve seen before. It doesn’t matter if the system has been enhanced because it’s still waltzing down the same beaten path that the driving game genre has already walked down.

Even the story touches on the same narrative beats as The Crew, though many outlets have thrown around the Fast and Furious comparison. Both games are about your character being betrayed by some total shitbag who works for a criminal empire that loves street racing, leading to you putting a crew together to get revenge.

need for speed payback

But it’s not just The Crew that’s been the victim of this conceptual carjacking. Players can earn respect for doing different tricks like drifting, driving into oncoming traffic and hitting big air. Most car games have this, so ordinarily it wouldn’t be brought up, but the system is so similar to that of Forza Horizon that it can’t be ignored.

Both games ask you to chain together stunts in order to earn the most points, and doing so will increase your score multiplier by increments of 0.1. But even then, Forza Horizon’s system is more expansive and rewarding. In that game, you’re rewarded bonus points for certain combos, like drifting and destruction.

Even the visual customisation is essentially lifted from Forza. It’s the same layer based system that allows players to combine generic shapes to create limitless designs, except once again it’s better elsewhere. Forza allows you to combine up to 3000 layers on the top, left and right of the car, and another 1000 at the front and back, giving creative types the means to follow through on whatever artistic vision they feel should adorn the side of a car.

Forza Horizon 3
Pictured: Horizon 3. A much better game.

Conversely, Need for Speed 2015 only gave players 300 layers total to create whatever manner of gaudy symbols they wish to stick on their car, and Payback seems to offer the same amount. And you can also download fellow player creations like you can in Forza, because if you’re going to borrow an idea, then borrow all of it.

All of these borrowed ideas ruin the personality or identity that the franchise has built up over years, which is a sorry state of affairs for a series that was a pioneer for the street racing genre. Back in the PS2 days, the Need for Speed brand evoked feelings beyond just being another driving game. You knew it was about neon drenched supercars, underground street racing and fantastic soundtracks.

NFS popularised the whole street racing genre, but now the series is a husk of its former self; lagging behind the rest of the pack. Games like Forza Horizon and (fingers crossed) the upcoming The Crew 2 are now paving the way for the genre going forward. Maybe it’s time to send the Need for Speed series off to the scrapyard for good.

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