It’s bland and broad twitch racing without the speed or the twitch and it’s around three ‘cool kids’ who make you sigh each time one of them speaks. With Need For Speed: Payback we have a racer designed to fit in the lowest common denominator of games. Criterion gave us two titles – perhaps the best in the series – before being downsized to create Ghost Games, the incumbent developer, and seeing its leaders leaving to start their own, new, development house.
This populist series began life on Panasonic’s 3DO and over the years has had multiple iterations trying different things, but always pivoting on the fact the driving is illicit in some way. They had been owned by EA since 2004 and now they were asked to manage the Need For Speed franchise. Criterion, the developers, had reached their peak and innovated in 360 degrees the twitch-racing genre. In 2008 we had the wonderful open world of Paradise City, in Burnout Paradise, a gigantic and varied area with anything and everything to do for hours and hours. As I can’t really get it, this will have to do as a substitute.
