Fine. You win. Whoever keeps insisting on repeatedly putting Need For Speed: Payback on sale finally broke me. I held off on this for as long as I could, but the game is always on sale, and the price just keeps getting lower. This time, the deluxe edition bottomed out at six bucks, and I just happened to have some left over funds in my MS wallet, so it finally happened.
Payback obviously didn’t sell very well. It received a ton of well-deserved criticism for it’s lootbox-driven progression system, with the game design hindered on purpose to make full use of the microtransactions on offer. It was critically and commercially panned, and even though I was cautiously optimistic at the time of its announcement, the news and blowback it was getting was enough to let it pass.
Besides, with games like Forza Horizon 4 offering all the racing bliss I needed at the time, there was no legitimate reason to subject myself to another mediocre game in the NFS series.
So why now? I think it’s more curiosity than anything. I don’t subscribe to EA Access, or else I would’ve already given it a look. I’m interested to see how the game had been tweaked after the blowback, and since most review sites usually don’t revisit games like this after they’re out for a while, I’m willing to give it a shot for the price of a cheap hamburger.
I’ve played pretty much every NFS game for the past few generations. I’ve even owned a few. Some have been decent, most have been kinda terrible. This one doesn’t look to stir the design pot in any way, so we’ll see how it goes.
