It’s an otherwise-good racing game that is just wrecked by this stupid monetization scheme. That’s why I say Payback is the first game completely ruined by loot boxes. Taking a mountain pass, effortlessly drifting around a hairpin turn, reaching the bottom and cutting across the sand to hit the next checkpoint, triggering your Nitrous boost and weaving between traffic-it gets my adrenaline up. There’s no cockpit view which is bizarre, and rubber-banding is still as much an issue as it was in 2015’s Need for Speed, but the more varied landscape of faux-Vegas and the faux-Mojave Desert is ripe for stunts. It’s the worst system I’ve ever seen in a singleplayer racing game, or any full-price singleplayer game.Īnd what sucks is that the underlying racing is actually pretty great. Not even the division! You can’t just unequip the cards from your last Drag car and move them to your new one. Again, all of your cards are locked to the car you earned them in. If that’s the case, you’re not starting at 155-you’re potentially starting as low as 120. And heaven forbid you bought a new car (or decided to use your newly-repaired derelict) instead of continuing to use that crappy Honda you got at the start of the game. Hope you have money or tokens lying around, otherwise you’re running old races ad nauseum and hoping something good drops or…buying loot boxes. You unlock the next tier and instead of it starting at 180 like you’d expect, every race immediately “Recommends” a car of at least Level 210. IDG / Hayden Dingman IDG / Hayden Dingman Most of you will probably finish closer to the lower end of that range. Given the padding built into the system, this means you could feasibly finish that tier with your cars anywhere from about 155 up to 190. The previous set of races, each of the five divisions tops out at a “Recommended” level of about 175 to 180 if I’m remembering correctly. In a normal racing game this would be exciting. Around 10 hours in you’ll finish one round of races and a new set will unlock. And to its credit Payback does spit free loot boxes out at the player at a decent rate, maybe two or three per hour if you’re competent at arcade racers.īut then you hit the grind. In case you couldn’t guess where this is going, loot boxes are the most reliable option for upgrading your cars, if only because they’re full of Tokens, and Tokens are the easiest/quickest path towards building a competent car. You can sell them or trade them in for Tokens, but if you buy a new car it starts from scratch and you need to repeat any of the previous options to build up an entirely new set of Speed Cards. Even Speed Cards you aren’t using, ones that are just sitting in your inventory because you have better options available, are completely useless. Oh, and did I mention Speed Cards can’t be shared between cars? Because they can’t. d) Get a bunch of Speed Tokens from loot boxes, and repeat Option C. c) Trade in old cards for “Speed Tokens,” three of which can then be fed into a virtual slot machine (gambling upon gambling!) in the hopes it spits out a usable card. b) Buy cards from the Tune-Up Shop for absurd prices, cutting into the same money you’d rather use to buy actual cars. It’s just monetized like an MMORPG.Įvery race in Payback has a “Recommended” rating attached, where “Recommended” means “If you’re more than 25 or 30 points lower than this, don’t even bother.” And how do you get more Speed Cards? Well, you have a few options a) Run old races again and hope something good drops. Except The Crew was a pseudo-MMORPG and Payback is decidedly not one. Fully-upgraded cars mostly top out at 300, with a handful of cars going up to 399.Īs I said, it’s weirdly similar to The Crew. Lower-end cars have a rating of about 120. This is all then tallied up in ways that are again completely impenetrable to the player, and your car receives an overall rating. After winning, you’ll get a new Speed Card for your car, maybe bumping its “Block” rating from a completely arbitrary 3 to a still-arbitrary-except-it’s-slightly-higher 4. Say you do a street race in Silver Rock a.k.a. IDG / Hayden DingmanĮach race you’re rewarded with a random Speed Card to put in one of these slots. Each car has six Speed Card slots, which roughly equate to actual car parts-Block, ECU, Turbo, Exhaust, Gearbox, and Head. Not Payback! Payback ditches all of the under-the-hood tweaking entirely, replacing it instead with a totally incomprehensible “Speed Card” system. This is how Need for Speed has also worked for years now. Normal racing games work like this: You race cars, you earn money, you use that money to either buy better cars or upgrade your current vehicle with new parts-a more powerful engine, grippier tires, a lighter-weight frame, and so on.
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