Players are accustomed to paying for accelerated passage, the discovery of unique items and access to special missions, either in mobile or online games. When you meet this in an arcade race, you ignore or donate to what you like visually, or you can enjoy it during the storyline campaign.
But in the new Need for Speed, the payback of this balance has been broken. And not only the attitude to the players who are engaged in collecting incomprehensible cards and glasses for pumping, but also the aesthetic component of the gameplay - the storyline.
The main character with friends is fighting with a corrupt criminal organization - "Home", which falsifies the results of street racing. To get to the bosses and talk to them "heart-to-heart", Tyler, Mac and Jess must defeat all the gangs of the city of Fortune Valley.
There are a lot of dialogs in the game. They could claim a way to fit the game to variations on the theme of "Fast and Furious", but the characters are faceless, and the phrases turned out to be a symbiosis of clumsiness and cheap pathos. The main characters do not stand out particularly. The bosses blurs in memory quite quickly. Of course, this type of games does not have to put in the center the refinement of speeches and acting, but they must not enrage and evoke a "hand-face" reaction.
And the problem is not just with the script. The gameplay also went not far. The open world seems to be quite good, but it lacks fullness. There are no recognizable locations and species, where I would like to stop and imagine that you are standing on a ledge in your Skylight, enjoying the sounds of the night city.
Classes of cars, by the way, are also organized seemingly logical, but you can pump the car for each of them only from the general budget. And God forbid not to match the level of pumping recommended for the race. If this happens, more advanced AI opponents will outperform you in 100 out of 100 cases. The models of machines do not have universality. Everything is decided by the routine pumping and obtained achivki.
After the race, you get a choice of three cards, turning over one of which, there will be an upgrade for the car. If it is of a higher level, we put it on the machine. If not, we turn it into a ticket, which then with two of the same others, gives the right to randomly choose again a random piece. Sometimes you can get useless bauble in the form of a horn signal. We liked to beat in virtual traffic about 15 years ago, but in 2017 such an upgrade only makes sense in the same network GTA Online. And then ... Here comes the first Donat. Coupons with a particular detail can be bought in stores, but if there is no suitable one - wait for the cards to change. This takes about 20 minutes of playing time. As you remember, there is nowhere to go for a drive, so you can go and drink tea.
In the end, put in the garage, the iconic and favorite models for sane gameplay time is not possible. They must be pumped through such a rand or buy sets with coupons for "live" money. You can and pereprohodit tasks, but about the chain of extraction of spare parts you already know.
In the races there are checkpoints through which you must definitely pass. It is no longer necessary to learn the tracks and be an expert in the geography of NFS. In the same furnace burned and runaways from the police. Just think: to go through such a race you need to go on check-points. In this case, the machine cops can be broken. Even if you neutralized all, the race must be completed until the end, having passed all the control points. At the same time, there will still be a time limit for which you have to reach, even in proud solitude, even with the pursuers on the tail.
Control in the head: there is no police in the open world at all. You just can not avoid patrolling fans.
What's good about the new NFS Payback? A variety of tuning, almost like in NFS Pro Street, which was almost a graphic editor of the design of cars. You can create it yourself or use kits from other players. But on the body parts you need to earn stars in trials. In video trailers, we were told separately about the search for rare cars. Yes, they are also their search in general, almost the only fascinating occupation. The search is based on the fragments of the sketches drawn. But then an ambush awaits. Found low-level machines and for their pumping again you need to pass races and collect cards. Use already open parts from other machines - you can not.
As a result, the cult series of games continues to lose its mark. The script is worse than "no", and the locations are ordinary. The pumping system is so tight that, in fact, it contradicts the idea of the possibility of a variety of virtual tuning of your pets. Donat would be appropriate with due execution of all of the above.