Customer Ratings & Reviews

The game is fun if you don’t mind driving around a very large open world. The derelict quests are fun, although I originally thought you just found them as you drive around which would have been more fun. I like the gameplay, there a a good amount of cars and you can customize them a lot. Trying to beat some of the races can get a little repetitive but it’s not a deal breaker, there are plenty of races to choose from so you can always go back and try again with a better car. All in all I’m enjoying it.

Excellent game. The graphics and storyline are so realistic. Really enjoy playing it.

Is a very good game, easy to play I recommend this game.

As the only NFS title compatible with the G29 (as of writing), I'm thrilled that it's awesome for the kids and myself. As a 30 year racing game fan, I can say it's not an accurate sim but typical of the NFS series for arcade racing. The gameplay is good, the storyline is decent, and the graphics are amazing. The detail in the road are realistic and the draw distance is excellent. Playing on a PS4 Pro at 4K with the G29 steering wheel and pedal kit is a really fun experience. Super happy the game offers the entire map and free-drive from the onset and you choose what to do and when. I'm using this as a driving simulator for teenagers (kids and their friends) and it's been a hit! Other track racing sims offer more realistic experience, but this one offers driving lessons in a real-world sim.

Need for Speed Payback is a fun open world racer and you could do much worse than playing it, but its attempts at goading the player into using micro-transactions, uneven difficulty and attempts to crib open world design elements from Forza Horizon keep the game from being truly great. You play as three protagonists, Tyler, Mac and Jess as they race Fortune Valley a Las Vegas stand-in as they complete various racing, drifting, dirt, drag and getaway events to take down 'The House' a cartel that has been fixing street races and screwed over Tyler. Blah blah, the story is knock-off Fast & Furious schlocky tripe, but nobody plays racing games for the plot anyway. The game can look very good at times and the open world is fun to drive around in, mostly because of the open world activities you can do in it. Smashing billboards, breaking speed records, drifting, finding derelict cars and challenging roaming racers are all fun to do, and I know that because I had fun doing them in Forza Horizon. Still, for people who don't have access to an XBox One or a decent PC, this game can be a good replacement for Forza in its best moments. It's just too bad that the highs are counterbalanced by a vehicle upgrade system that, maybe true to the game's Las Vegas aesthetic feels less like upgrading a car and more like pulling a lever on a slot machine. To the game's credit, since it has been released the game has made its upgrade system kinder and gentler, putting less pressure on the player to give in and purchase micro-transactions. However simply having to engage with a randomized upgrade system that was designed to frustrate you into paying more left a bad taste in my mouth, regardless of them walking it back. Also, this game has some of the more ridiculously blatant rubber banding I've seen in a racing game in a long time. You will absolutely feel it when you eat wall and get sent to the back of the pack and the cars ahead of you slow down to give you a chance, just as you will when you're ahead and the cars always manage to stay close enough to pass you if you make one single mistake, no matter how high you've leveled your car. This ties back into the micro-transactions; the game seems to purposefully try to frustrate you so you will go to the store and pull the level on the slot machine and hope you get something useful. Forget about being the same level as an event being enough to beat it; I found that you need to be at least 15 to 20 levels higher before your chances of winning went from being a coin toss to likely. All in all, it's an okay game, but people with access to Forza Horizon 3 should just get that instead.

I have mixed feelings about this game, it's beautiful in my opinion and I personally love driving around and open world. Sadly, the story missions are brutal, I'm a seasoned gamer with over 25 + years gaming experience behind me, and I am having a extremely difficult time trying to progress through the story missions which I intentionally chose to play on there EASY difficulty and I'm now stuck about maybe 2/3 through this game. You have to complete the story missions in order to unlock the cars for purchase, I have every car category in this game maxed out at 399 as every attempt at the target level power rating failed for me to beat the AI, so I maxed out and am still losing to way under powered cars. Aproach this game with caution, as its fun is in free roaming and upgrading the vehicles.

Similar to The older Drag Version that took place at night with the highlight elements of the last entry Most Wanted which now seems like 10 years ago. If you enjoyed MW, or any of the previous three, this ia a Good Next-Gen 2017 Update with Depth. My question is the game are much like a sports Port-can we not have a new one even Year? At least not these 2.5-3 years EA seems to stick to, yet we get nothing that shows they spent time like that on the last 4 installments. Good as always though-Arcade for those who fall asleep playing Gran Turismo yet are Car experts like myself. If enjoy driving the Fiat 300C on challenges unlike me-this game is holds it's arcade gameplay while adding more story and usual upgrades. Get the Platinum pack though.

I have bought almost every Need for Speed game over the years dating back to High Stakes on PS1 and this entry was good but a little disappointing to be honest. I will start off with the good things. It gorgeous, as expected. Need for Speed games always look really pretty especially since they switched to the Frostbite engine. The world is also quite sizable. It definitely feels like the largest to date. There is also a rather large selection of cars even excluding the DLC cars which is good for those who don't want to spend the extra cash. The derelict cars are a pretty cool idea, although I wish there were more. The engine sounds are pretty good once the cars are upgraded. Pretty realistic and they are recognizable. The idea of cosmetic Super Builds once a car reaches a certain level is a great idea, really making the car look the part. They also have way more custom parts for super cars than previous games which is cool if you want to make it feel like your own. General handling, especially for race and drift cars is excellent and fun with a great sense of speed. Live tuning is also a great idea. NOS is also not as important to gameplay as other NFS games which I think is a good thing but it's still there if you need that little extra bit to get past a competitor on the last stretch. Now for the things I don't care for. The music selection sucks. Even if rap/hip-hop is your genre of choice there are far too few songs. If I had to guess I would say there are only 1.5-2 hours of music that play during regular driving. This gets old quick, especially if you sit down and play for 3-4 hours. That means you heard every song twice in one sitting. In previous games it let you turn individual songs on and off which would have helped. I really wish more games let you feed in your own music either from Spotify or locally. I could play it over the top of the game but it's really hard to balance the sound effects and music that way and that means the music plays during cut scenes. Anyway, moving on from music, the other biggest complaint I have with the game is how much upgrading costs. You can easily dump $100k into a car between every event in order to stay ahead of the curve but you only get about $25k from any given event which means you are always strapped for cash. This gets worse the further you get in the game, the exact opposite of how it should be. By the last story event you should be able to buy whatever car and upgrade you want without having to budget everything. You upgrade with speed cards at shops which are random so some times they don't even carry the part you need. I get the random perk and level from cards you win but shops should have a more consistent stock. Especially if I'm spending that much money. While this game has a pretty good selection of events, race, drag, drift, off road, and runner, some of the events, especially near the end of the game, require you to do stupid things with a car that it wasn't built for. Taking a drag car on a twisty highway or a runner car for long sections of off road. This leads to real frustration when the car refuses to behave because it wasn't built for it. And you can't cheat the system by using another class of car on those select events because you can only enter cars in their respective class events. Being able to live tune is really cool and useful except they don't let you do while you are participating in an event which kind of defeats the purpose. If you tweaked your car incorrectly before the event you have to quit the event, tune it, and then restart the event. Super annoying. The story is okay but the characters are very one dimensional and unnatural even resorting to catch phrases. I also wish there were more cinematic events in the game. The highway car heist that was played at E3 2017 was the best event in the game. I was hoping for a whole game of ridiculous Fast and Furious type heists and action, but alas, it was not so. It's much more normal than that. I think that could have really made it stand out in the genre. NFS The Run is still one of my favorite NFS games just because of how well they were able to blend racing with cinematic events. It really made you feel like a hero. My final thoughts. I know my list of complaints is longer than the pros but that doesn't mean it's bad game by any means. It's very enjoyable to play and besides having the penny-pinch constantly the general experience is pretty positive with the other problems only popping up once in a while (except music, but that can be turned off). This one feels kinda like a less balanced Most Wanted (2012) but a bigger world. So if you like Need for Speed games definitely give this one a go.

This time I feel great about my purchase of need for speed payback and would totally recommend this game to anyone looking for a great action racing game. It also entails a lot of new stuff like derelicts that you can drive around the map and find car parts to build cool cars. It also gives you more motivation to beat the side objectives so yoou can gain access to customization tools. Over all like I said would definitely recommend

It seem as though people are giving this game a low star rating because of the micro and hate that you have to drive so far to get to a race event. Not a problem because on my way there I'm breaking speed trap records ( which gives you earnings). Crashing through Billboards etc. I can care less about the voice as one mentioned did not like the voice of characters and complaints about how to upgrade your vehicle but the vehicle that I have now is way better than more than half of what the dealerships had to offer from manually upgrading it.. you do not have to accept all upgrades because sometimes when you upgrade something you might lose something from overall performance like if you upgrade your brakes, you will lose horsepower ( not a lot) but you will be informed before you accept by looking at your side bar attributes. Great graphics and gameplay wins my heart. Its not a perfect game but it's pretty close to it. if you think about it from a higher scale prospective then you will understand why I gave this 5 stars

Just ended main story, Origin says 13 hours gameplay. Game is very entertaining at good moments, many races are simply wild and fun, but there're some bad moments like mountain races with drag car, like very random off-road races (handling not easy in my car) - really many ways to lose some time. Similar race number to every other NFS game, main story sth like 80 races (but lots of them are long). I could call this game creative and diverse. Many new ideas like renovating car wreckages, like random tuning, like many car classes needed to develop at same time. Simply put there're very many experiments on new elements, many of them are playable (some even excellent), but some simply won't satisfy every player. And most of them are part of main story. Map is in my opinion average in size, but really dense packed with u-turns, mountain roads and off-road crosscountry. Very many things to do other than racing, 100 tokens to find (I found 10 during main story, and rather every route raced), wreckage parts, drift, speed, jump challenges. This game is very corelated (even mechanics prequel imho) to Heat. Not in story, but many cars from this game are somehow pointed out in Heat (wreckages for example), and many things done rather bad in this game are gone in Heat. Its very visible to me, I would rather recommend playing Payback before Heat. Finally, story in this game is very visible. 3 different characters used for different races (just for story, no changes in gameplay), lots of cutscenes, lots of gangs with their leaders (every has his/her own voice acting). Simply very many different voices talk nearly all the time (not every time its a cutscene, most just phone calls). Lots of talking, really Good game to play, maybe was better at the beggining with lots of other players (don't know). 5 star might be a bit too much, but for racing fans it'll be good entertainment.

the only way for this game to get better is for you to be able to get out of the car and walk around.,..but then that would be GTA right? Very good game with good racing and a lot of customization

The graphics are amazing for the game, controls are easy. Who doesn't like playing NFS with a decent story line. Upgrades and car mods are quite similar to the mobile games by nfs.

Very nice graphics, it’s pretty immersive and inspiration from Las Vegas is nice. Easy to get your hands on, it’s certainly not a simulation but feels very good.

This game I've been waiting for is one of the best racing games, it has some great graphics and a very good story to play and you can play it online with your friends too

I got this on blackfriday deal and this game is really fun to play..great gameplay and storyline

I really wonder why IGN and some other reviewers gave this game such a low rating? It’s actually pretty fun and a decent overall racing game!

Very good arcade racing game. Not as realistic as other titles but still a fun game

So much realistic to drive. Excellent graphics and a huge selection of cars.

Great graphics and a lot of details and specific parts to choose from