While the special Runner missions sound exciting at first, being focused on escapes and battles against police cars, but in reality turn out to be either boring or just plain frustrating. Drag races are some of the worst races I’ve experienced in any racing game. Drifting is great and works rather well with the handling in this game. Off-road races are usually mediocre and sometimes frustrating. Races range from being boring to being somewhat okay. ![]() That whole event bundle is, shockingly, a DLC for the game (available as part of the Deluxe edition), despite being the highlight of the entire game and being far superior to what you get during the mainline. Frankly, I was seriously considering dropping it altogether after a few hours, and it wasn’t until I decided to play a separate event sequence about Speedcross on a whim that I got more invested in the game. Not that the game itself is that exciting. So a lot of the time will be spent just driving to where you need to be to play the game. And the amount of fast travel points in the game is far more limited than you might want. You can’t just start a race, you must ride to where it begins and stop. Apart from a rather curious concept of treasure hunting for unlocking several special cars. It doesn’t help that all of the open world busywork is there literally to be busywork and aren’t even remotely fun to do. And despite the technologically advanced visuals, there’s nothing exciting about how the game looks. The world in the game is, frankly, boring. The real events are real and don’t force the “cinematic moments” in just for the sake of it. And luckily, unlike The Run, most of the really heavily scripted sequences happen during situations, where you’re not meant to believe like you’re actually racing instead of going through a scripted sequence. And to be fair, while I still don’t understand the desire to put any storyline in an NFS game, this might be one of the better ones in the series. The plot is sadly unavoidable, but at least it has a few decent characters in it. Oh and because it’s EA from 2017, almost every aspect of the game is designed for microtransactions and loot boxes, to the point that the setting of the game is a city full of casinos and gambling. ![]() And every racing event belongs to a certain class that requires a separate car, so you can’t off-road in a car made for drifting, or do races in a car made for drag racing. On top of it, it focuses way too much on the open world, and by that I mean busywork and pointless driving to where the actual race is. As such, it has a (terrible) story with (boring) characters that explains every racing event that happens, though at least it lacks QTEs. Need for Speed Payback is a rather bizarre desire to combine elements from The Run and Most Wanted, but also add in distinctly different classes of cars for different types of events. Not much, but it’s not an entirely unfun experience. Yet, I did get through the entire game, having played most of the events, so there is something good to it as well. First one up was Need for Speed Payback and I gotta say, the first impressions were very poor. After having a blast replaying Hot Pursuit (2010) in its Remastered version, I’ve decided to check what the series have actually been up to in the latest entries.
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