Need For Speed-Payback : Open Skies  [Race 15] {Walkthrough/Gameplay}
Channel: theRedLad
Date: 2019-03-09

Need for Speed Payback
Race 15 : Open Skies 
[No Commentary]

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IGN Review :
Need for Speed Payback is one step forwards and two steps back for EA’s 23-year-old racing series. While Payback does fix a host of the 2015 Need for Speed reboot’s missteps, it also brushes away a lot of the stuff developer Ghost Games got right at that time.

You see, Need for Speed 2015 brought with it a resurrection of the spirit of 2003 and 2004’s successful Underground games and saw the return of meaningful performance and visual customisation. Between all the hokey live-action, first-person fist-bumping it also revolved around encounters with real-world automotive icons. That’s an idea I still genuinely like. Of course, it was very short, the world was largely empty, there initially wasn’t any drag racing, and you couldn’t even pause the game in single-player. It was flawed, no doubt.

Payback remedies all that latter stuff. There’s a much longer experience here – it took me around 17 hours to complete the story alone. Plus, the world is filled with extra activities and events, drag racing is included from the get-go, and yes, you can pause it. Truly a novelty.

But elsewhere? Well, unfortunately, Payback has gambled and lost.

You may have heard that Payback has dialled back on the pure street racing focus in favour of a self-described “action driving” experience. The reality is that racing still pads out the bulk of the driving in Payback and the new “action driving” stuff is limited to a small handful of movie-inspired sequences and Payback’s new police pursuit system. They may look exciting on the surface, but they aren’t really that demanding; unlike, say, the Stuntman games, Payback doesn’t require us to do any of the trickier stuff ourselves – the game takes over all the cool bits. We’re just driving from cutscene to cutscene. They’re well-executed, particularly how they seamlessly swap you between characters and vehicles (like the opening moments of Forza Horizon 3), but they’re completely scripted. Fast and frantic, but shallow and not worth replaying. They’re really just built to service Payback’s paper-thin story, which starts with a confounding succession of betrayals and ends without ever really going anywhere interesting.

The cop chases feel largely neutered too; escaping police is now a totally linear exercise, where we have to follow a set path via checkpoints within a time limit instead of improvising and doing something unpredictable to throw them off. Taking down cop cars in these events has a welcome enough Burnout 3 flavour to it – muscling your pursuers into spectacular slow-motion collisions with poles and parked cars is fun – but I don’t think it was worth losing proper pursuits for. No more darting down random side-streets at the last second to shake the fuzz, or parking in a dimly-lit area with the engine off, like Need for Speed 2015. There aren’t any cops around during free-roam, either; they’re only present in story missions or at certain triggers spread around the map that will initiate another linear, pre-set chase.

Payback changes things up slightly in the penultimate race event, where it adds cops in the middle of an actual race, but otherwise police pursuits are basically now just time trials where the AI is trying to stop you. The cop AI seems robust enough, and they’ll work on boxing you in when they have the numbers, but I didn’t find them too dangerous. They’re supernaturally fast (as usual, standard issue Crown Vics are able to go doorhandle-to-doorhandle with seven-figure supercars) but player-controlled cars are incredibly powerful battering rams, tearing through cop cars like a bad curry through a colon.

The rest of Payback is wrapped up in drifting and racing – including street, off-road, and drag. The handling model is accessible, arcade fare – long, lazy drifts are possible with a dab of brake and a bootful of throttle. That said, I’ve had more than a few events ruined by some overly hostile AI. The respawning is a bit aggressive, too. After clipping an obstacle or skirting with a steep slope I often found myself being respawned in the middle of the track after a few seconds, even though I’d instantly recovered and was already speeding off in the right direction.

The events themselves are all tied to defeating themed race crews spread over the map, each of whom introduces themselves like they’re the Most Important People on Earth. It’d be almost funny if the script was equipped with a single ounce of self-awareness, but Payback treats its cast of hip young millennials and soda commercial cast-offs like they’re the coolest thing since the other side of the pillow. Unfortunately, they’re not cool, or funny. They’re not even actually likeable, to be honest. The three main player-controlled characters are the worst offenders, ranging from irksome to infuriating.