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What Was The Last Game You Played?


19QOS19

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You need to play it on hard to get the true experience. I can't remember if it automatically makes saving by ink ribbon mandatory on hard or if you need to toggle it on.

On hard you don't regenerate health, don't have is much inventory space or ammo and the zombies do more damage. That and the ink ribbons makes it much more like the original.
I was planning on eventually playing through it again as Leon so will do that playthrough on hard (and probably give up after an hour).
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Finished two games this week

Persona 5 Royal

Probably the best JRPG I'll ever play even if it ended up taking me nearly 170 hours to finish the entire game. Ludicrously big game that sagged a bit in the middle but stuck the two landings perfectly. I was sceptical a turn based RPG could be decent in 2020 but it's deep and challenging enough to require a proper strategy in a lot of battles but streamlined enough that I didn't have to go looking for guides too many times.  The way the game introduces dozens of social links, activities, and items in the real world and only hints at the payoff when you enter the metaverse was really good as well and meant I had to constantly experiment and spread myself around all my possible tasks so that I didn't lock myself out of any possible combat benefits and story content further in the game. 

Also it's just a really funny and charming game in a way that Final Fantasy fails to be most of the time. The perfect lockdown game as I finished this in three months instead of three years. The only knockback I would give it (apart from the middle Palaces being a little dull) is that the replayability is heavily undermined in Royal (effectively an expansive version of the original Persona 5) because the extra semester leaves you enough time to close off virtually every social link you're given as well as allowing you to max out your stats and hit level 100. Not sure if I can be gassed with another run through to see maybe 3-4 new bits of content unless I can justify playing through on Merciless difficulty. 

If you want a timesink that is slightly stressful in the amount to do and the lack of time to do it but has a good momentum, a great story and great characters then this is a good game. Word of warning though, it's full of weeb shit and some of it is especially sus but that's Japan, baby!

 

Quantum Break

The forgotten link between Alan Wake and Control. Gameplay wise it's nowhere near as clunky as Alan Wake but not anywhere near as smooth as Control was although it should be credited with introducing a lot of the powers that made Control so fun to play. The story is typical time travel nonsense but it's elevated by enlisting a load of star talent in Aiden Gillen, Dominic Monaghan, Shawn Ashmore and especially Lance Reddick who is as menacing and enigmatic as he always is. It was a fine and fun 8 hour blast that I would probably play a sequel of. That goes up to a definitely if they make Lance Reddick's Martin Hatch the primary antagonist in the next one. 

If you want a developer that, like David Cage's Quantic Dream, wants to make television/ movies in video games but, unlike David Cage, actively wants to make them fun to play and enjoyable then is a good game. I would probably recommend Control and maybe Alan Wake above this though. The fact that Remedy are slowly unveiling that all their games take place in the same universe might make this a must play eventually though.

 

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Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (PS4, 2016)

You know what I thought when I played the first three Uncharted games earlier this year? I spent the entire time thinking "I want more Nathan Drake." I just can't get enough of this smug, boring mass-murderer who never shuts up, and never actually says anything clever or witty despite being extremely full of himself. I need more! Well, it seems Naughty Dog actually found some people who think that because with Uncharted 4 not only is Nathan Drake back and insufferable as ever, he's got a big brother who's exactly the same. And he's now married to Elena who's got even worse patter than he does. Fantastic. 

Standard Uncharted plot applies - you are Nathan Drake and with the usual assortment of accomplices there's a treasure for you to go and find. Rather than semi-mythical concepts like El Dorado or Shangri-La however he's off looking for some pirate treasure. Now that I think about it, it's quite a literal interpretation of the concept of a treasure hunt. I don't care about the plot to offer more details. Gameplay is the usual combination of third person runny jump climby cover shooty, with the occasional ropey... swingy section. Sorry.  I'm going to do this review the opposite way round to usual - gameplay first, plot/themes/narratives second. 

Gameplay is what it is. I suppose with the amount of third person games Naughty Dog have done since the first Uncharted they should know what they're doing by now. There are a few additions to the series. The rope swinging sections where you can jump from a ledge, swing a grappling hook to a pole and swing to the next one, they're okay I guess. There are some sliding sections too, but both of these just seem inserted for a bit of variety when moving from one place to another, there's nothing exciting about them. Halfway through the game there's a new climbing mechanic introduced, the piton, where you have to press square to dig into a section of wall and jump to another ledge rather than go straight from ledge to ledge. This just proves they're adding stuff for the sake of it. It doesn't serve any purpose. It's just busywork. There are areas where you can easily reach the next ledge with the standard jump but can't until you've jammed yourself into the wall first. Why? Just get on with it.

Two of my biggest problems with combat in the first three Uncharteds were melee combat and stealth. Melee is fixed by finally being a much smaller part of the game. It's there if you want to, but you're not forced into it aside from one or two scripted scenes. Good. Stealth is back and there are quite a few open areas with lots of enemies and lots of different ways to approach it. This sounds like a good idea in theory, but every such area I can think of right now always has the same problem. You can stake out one enemy, watch their path, finally decide to go in for a stealth attack only to discover one of the other fifteen guys in the area can suddenly see you, and a gunfight ensues. Unlike previous games where stealth was an option but never felt tangibly rewarding, here you're encouraged to do it in areas where it's too awkward to do properly. I don't think the open-ended areas offer much to gameplay either for the same reason. Even if you plan an attack on an area the controls get too fiddly during combat, with the same button for rolling and taking cover making what you actually do when you press it a complete lottery.

In addition to less melee than before, there aren't as many puzzles in Uncharted 4. This is bad. The puzzles in the first two games were insulting, the third game brought them up a good bit, then here there are about three of them in the game total and they're not hard. This makes the game feel generic more than anything else, and it's a real drawback. If there's an aspect of your game that offers a bit of variety and lateral thinking, why not stick with it? Now that I think about it, the game's dumbed down in other ways. Even if you turn off the very pushy in-game hint notifications, you still get them. Stand still for more than five seconds and either Nathan or his companion will say "Hey! Try going over to this area which is extremely obviously the way through the level!" Leave me alone. 

New to the series is a more open-ended feel to some of the sections. In some cases this is just a few extra possible paths to reach the end of a platforming section, in one or two it's a huge area with some buildings to explore. Now that I think about it though, this one section in particular acts mainly as a vehicle (heh) to listen to the character development (and I'll come to this later). While searching for pirate king Henry Avery and his treasure, Nathan, brother Sam and Sully go to Madagascar. You get a jeep and a big open area to drive around in with some vehicle based platforming which, for the most part, is a nice diversion. While there are some buildings to explore and some pointless collectables to find, none of it serves any purpose. I find it strange that a game centred around characters who go on these wild adventures is so shallow in terms of your interaction with the world. 

Since I played the first three games on PS4, I didn't get to experience their multiplayer. Uncharted 4 has multiplayer. I played it. I was useless. It's been a long time since I played a shooter online, but this seems very focused on people who've played it for a long time having a massive advantage in terms of weapons and equipment. There's also a Survival mode which I'm still in the process of playing. To call it cheap would be an understatement. I understand it's also gone through a series of patches and rebalancing which made payable DLC weapons more effective and then less effective, so it's deliberately cheap. Still, it offers something markedly different if you enjoyed the combat. There's a massive range of weapons in the game, so it's a chance to work through those if nothing else. 

When I come to games some time after they've been released it's usually for the same reasons. Like everyone else nowadays I have a massive backlog and little reason to buy anything when it's newly released. In rare cases if it's a game I have some interest in but don't need immediately, I try to ignore it and coverage of it until it's time to play so I can go in unspoiled. As a result the only thing I really knew about the Uncharted series was how everyone loved Nathan Drake, how he was so funny and great and it seemed like everyone who played the games really bought into his character.

After the first three games, I did not share this sentiment. After the fourth, I would pay full AAA price for something that just lets me harm Nathan Drake and all his friends in as many creative ways as possible. I don't get this guy at all. He doesn't have a personality, he has impeccable hair and an inability to shut up. His big brother Sam, retconned into Nathan's backstory, is the same (although he's balding). Having two of them chatting shit to one another somehow isn't even worse than Nathan on his own, it's just blander. One shit patter merchant begets another, and I don't see the point in adding one.

The interesting thing about Uncharted 4 is that for a brief, beautiful moment there actually is a suggestion of a character. Nathan is past his treasure hunting days. He's married Elena and they live in a suspiciously large house on his salvage company wage and her sporadic travel writing. They have an irritatingly cutesy relationship where they play Crash Bandicoot to decide who does the dishes (side-note: Nathan complains about that game having loading times, but when they're in Madagascar he champions having pen and paper with him because phone signals are unreliable - make your mind up) and he occasionally retreats to his attic with all his stolen wares from his past to reminisce. This is the first time in an Uncharted game where I was interested in what Nathan Drake thought about things, and what he did in the world. It lasts about twenty minutes.

If his relationship with Sam is annoying, it's nothing compared to when Elena catches up to him. Aside from a brief part of Uncharted 3 she's always been a particularly beige female character, someone who's just sort of there and is so obviously the inevitable love interest it's like she doesn't bother acting upon it because it'll so obviously happen. Fine. Here though, when she finds out Nathan lied to her about going on a salvage job, there's conflict. She's had enough, she storms out. When she goes to pick him up after they've reached the island along with the mercenary army who're there to get the treasure too, she tells him she almost didn't go back this time.

Great! I think. We're going to get conflict, we're going to get someone telling him what an arse he is for a change. Nope. One faux-earnest monologue later everything's back to normal and Elena's returning the awful banter with more enthusiasm than Sam ever did. Great. It's somehow even more annoying from her. It's like Naughty Dog saw an opportunity for some interesting characterisation and deliberately didn't bother. 

There are some comparisons to make between the characterisation in Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us. During a driving section Nathan tells Elena why he never told her about his brother. The conversation eventually drifts away to some piano music while you're driving through a river and a waterfall. This isn't character development. The Last of Us' success was based in the grounded, desperate nature of the characters. Trying to transplant that into a different series that's never been like that doesn't work when it's done so briefly. You can't give people personalities in twenty seconds when they don't have any. To be clear, I don't think the characters in The Last of Us were any good either. But that style of writing is completely unsuitable for the Uncharted series, and when it's done so sparingly it just draws attention to how out of place it is. 

The kindest thing I can say about Uncharted 4 is that its ending is seemingly unequivocal. It's an ending. I'm not going to be rushing to play any more Uncharteds that happen to be made. Number 4 isn't a bad game, but I have no interest in the characters or what happens to them. If I feel that way after nearly ten years, I guess it's just not for me. 

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On 10/11/2020 at 00:01, 19QOS19 said:

Aye I think you should just knock Naughty Dog titles on the head. They seem to upset you to an uhealthy level emoji38.png

Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter are great. It's when they do humans it's unbearable.

Edited by Miguel Sanchez
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On 09/10/2020 at 21:59, MixuFruit said:

GTA Online. Can't understand why this is so popular, other human beings ruins it.

Could say the same about online gaming in general TBH.

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Need for Speed Payback (PS4, 2017)

I have played three Need for Speed games in my life. The first was Shift, a more realistic circuit-racing based effort from the studio that would eventually put out the Project Cars games (a series which ironically has gone full arcade with its 3rd instalment, released in 2020). The second was Hot Pursuit, effectively a less colourful version of Burnout Paradise but with real cars.

The third was 2017's Payback. It took me 32 hours over about two and a half weeks to finish. It is, quite comfortably, one of the worst games I've ever played.

When I think about video games I often lament that there aren't really any car-focused open world games anymore. Take the original Driver for instance, one of the finest examples of the genre. A map, a car to drive around in. It works. Ever since Grand Theft Auto 3 though, you had to control the human too. You had to get out and shoot things. I wonder what it would be like if you had a proper 2020-scale open world focused on the car, or even at least vehicles. Could you still make a game like this and make it good?

Payback certainly isn't that game. You are Tyler Morgan, Mac, and Jess. You live in... er, a fictionalised version of Las Vegas and you all like driving and racing. There's a corrupt casino called The House that fixes all the street racing to make money off it, and our heroes fall foul of this. They then have to work their way back up through Fake Vegas' local street racing leagues to take on the House.

The main problem with the characterisation, the writing and the world building in Payback is how generic it is. At the start when the story and characters were being introduced they all felt so bland and uninteresting it was almost uncanny. The whole game feels like it was designed by committee to be as bland and inoffensive as possible. Weirdly though, there are times where it feels as if it tries to mock that kind of media. There are some 'characters' that talk like stereotypical online streamers/influencers and I'm clearly supposed to feel like I'm in on the joke with the game. It's like parents in a bad American sitcom trying show how down with the kids they are, breaking your spine with cringe in the process.

The best bit is when you're working your way through the racing leagues. Each league has a boss and your character talks to them at the start of a race. Except the cutscenes don't feature people and only show you the front of the cars next to each other on the road, so it's like there aren't any people at all and it's the cars that have come to life. That would be more interesting.

I only mention how bad all of this stuff is because the game tries to make it engaging and fails. I could easily overlook this if the gameplay compensated for it adequately. On the face of it there's a lot of potential here. There's a large range of cars and upgrade options for them. You can upgrade the starting cars as much as you want, but as you progress through the story you can buy faster, more expensive cars which ultimately have better stats. There are five types of racing you can build a car for - Race, Offroad, Drift, Drag and Runner. Each car type handles differently and the variety in gameplay does keep the game interesting as you switch between disciplines.

This, sadly, is where the potential ends. I have never played a game with cars in it with physics as bad as this. You play an arcade racer, you expect to be able to easily slide a car round corners. Especially a map with as many long, open curved sections as Payback. You can't. You have to effectively force handbrake turns everywhere, a combination of handbrake, regular brake and as much sudden violent steering as possible. Trying to manage this is just baffling, and it barely gets any better even when the cars are upgraded. That's just trying to move a car on the road, offroad is much worse. No matter how much power you try to put down, the car will fishtail. You won't get it back. Considering the offroad racing still requires you to go on the offroad paths or be slowed down, the lack of control makes keeping up your speed almost impossible.

The story is centred loosely around a particular car, the Koenigsegg Regera. This is a very powerful and fast car. It's also the biggest example of how bad the physics are in the game. I got one as I was trying to finish some of the speed run activities dotted around the map where you have to maintain a certain average speed over a stretch of road. You push, push and push to try and make the thing rotate in a corner, nothing happens until you go over the limit and you lose it.

There's a live tuning menu in each car that lets you change a few tuning aspects while you drive. They do make a difference to the handling, but it only seems to be a different kind of unmanageable. It didn't make the Regera any better with full downforce. I turned on 'Stability Control' and it made no difference. I like the idea of the tuning menu, and each discipline of car has different things to alter, but the differences it makes to your cars performance are negligible at best. And here's a thing. You press down to open the menu, but you have to hold it for two seconds to close it. Why? All this does is force you to come to a stop every time you want to change something, or you'll be distracted long enough to crash into something if you're still driving.

Drag racing was interesting. You have to do the gearshifts manually and time them properly to go as quickly as possible. That's good and interesting and what I imagine a Need for Speed should be. It's undermined a lot by happening on non-straight public streets with seemingly randomly-spawning cars, but it's a nice holiday from the terrible handling model found elsewhere.


Upgrading your cars is an especially obnoxious experience. You can buy Speed Cards with the in-game currency to upgrade one of six parts of your car. If the tune-up shop doesn't have an upgrade you like you can spin a slot machine to try and get one that will help your car. You need tickets for this and you earn a lot less of those than you do the in-game currency. Not to worry though, you can always spend as much real money as you like!

Here's an idea. Don't make a boring game then put microtransations in it to give players good cars. I don't even know why you'd bother spending money when you can just change the difficulty setting. Just create a closed in-game economy which is properly balanced where you can upgrade your cars by playing it. Super simple stuff.

So, how to sum up Need for Speed Payback? A game that controls horribly, writing that has the nerve to try to be clever but is nowhere near intelligent enough to manage it and a story that's fundamentally boring anyway, an uninteresting map and while there's some variety in the gameplay it's so dull and repetitive that the entire thing just feels like a checklist to complete. The game has no redeeming qualities and the bad aspects of it are outright obnoxious. The boring content, awful story and terrible upgrade system just make the game feel lazy and cynical, and since it's published by EA I suppose it is. Like the most rudimentary means of taking up someone's time, offering nothing new or engaging but having as basic a sense of progression as possible so you don't feel like you're wasting effort.

Oh! I forgot the soundtrack. In games like this you want something that's either iconic or something that just sits there in the background without you noticing it. It does neither. It's bad. Bad enough to turn it off. You can almost admire how bad it is, it stands out against the rest of the horrific backdrop I've described.

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Dirt 4 (PS4, 2017)

Dirt 4 is not the fourth game in the Dirt series. It's the eleventh full release in a series that started with Colin McRae Rally in 1998. After the various different game modes besides rally driving that featured in Dirt 3 the series spun off into the dedicated Dirt Rally game of 2016, which aimed to be a more serious sim than the more accessible regular Dirt series.

I'm fed up of saying 'dirt' and 'series' by now, so I'll get to the point. Despite Dirt Rally's existence Dirt 4 still features rally driving as the primary game mode, alongside Rallycross and "Land Rush," which is effectively Rallycross but with bigger cars, jumps, and no tarmac sections on the circuits. There are a few different game modes. Online you can compete against people in daily, weekly and monthly time trials. You can compete against other people unranked in a standard multiplayer lobby with changeable settings, or you can play the Pro Tour mode where you do rally stages against other people at the same time but not on track together. The game's quite old so it's hard to get a match, and I won all but one of the races I did.

There's a mode I don't even remember the name of. Joyride, I think. This is similar to what I remember of Dirt 3's Gymkhana modes where you have a closed area with a range of surfaces and obstacles for you to drive around in in any of the game's cars. In addition to free play there are time trial courses and Joyride mode itself, where there are a range of blocks dotted around for you to hit within a time limit. This last mode is pointless because you'd need to try each course several times before you figured out a route that allowed you to hit every block quickly enough. The time trials are also pretty repetitive since they're on a closed course, with different sections coming up repeatedly. 

The career mode comprises the three disciplines I mentioned already, although they're not weighted evenly. You can finish all the Land Rush events in about two hours. Rallycross is a bit more than that, while Rally goes on forever. It took me over a month and a half of playing this game pretty regularly to get to the end of the career, and I didn't even finish every available championship. While this sounds like it's got a lot of content, it actually just feels like a slog.

In addition to the career mode there's a "My Team" option where you can invest your winnings in a few things. You can buy cars for competing in different championships. You can upgrade facilities and hire engineers to work on your car during events and a PR agent to negotiate with the engineers and your potential sponsors, which you also add to give you some extra cash. This whole process feels very sterile, with a big disconnect between what I do in a car and what happens afterwards. Upgrading car parts and hiring good engineers doesn't matter much. In my time playing I think I over-ran the allotted time for car repairs once. By the time you have a full team of the best engineers you could repair a write-off in twenty minutes for peanuts. 

The biggest reminder of how futile all of this is comes at the start of every stage. Your co-driver always says something to the effect of "if we do well here, we can get some cash-flow for parts." No matter what you've won or how much money you have. I don't have an issue with the My Team section as a concept, but it doesn't seem connected to any of your achievements. It doesn't help that you don't actually need to use it to progress through the career. You'll always have offers from other teams with a range of cars to drive. Come to think of it, the only benefit of buying and running your own cars is picking and colouring one of the seven custom liveries and having some awkwardly placed sponsor decals. I don't see the point.

I mentioned earlier that the career is a slog, and it bears repeating. Rather than distinct stages Dirt 4 has a feature called "Your Stage" which randomly generates the courses. Given the nature of rally courses this is something that in theory is a good idea for this style of racing, and I suppose it does work. There are times on longer courses where you'll notice corners are repeated. In all honesty though, the career mode is long and it took me a fair amount of time to realise the courses were randomly generated, so I can't fault it for this. The biggest problem with it is probably the effect it has on the graphics. The original Colin McRae Rally is the first racing game I remember playing where things you did changed the appearance of the car, whether it was damaging it or driving through dirt and mud. While this fine tradition continues with the cars which all look great (Rallycross in particular benefits from this here), the course and surrounding areas are genuinely embarrassing. I was amazed when I started playing the game and saw how bad they were, especially when I considered that Gran Turismo Sport was released the same year. 

The main problem with the career is that it just doesn't end. With the stages all being generated there's technically no difference between finishing those and loading up a bunch of custom stages of your own. There's no sense of achievement, and this ties in with the disconnect between the career mode and the custom team settings. It feels like a lot of thought went into the content, only with no structure to give it any meaning. The Land Rush and Rallycross sections of the career being so brief doesn't help here either, with no distinction between preparation for them outside of actually being in a car and racing. The Rallycross events are on real tracks and you drive against all the real world championship drivers, but again it feels hollow.

This lack of refinement in the details is evident in the menus and the racing. There are times where your co-driver is actively dangerous - they make mistakes and tell you the wrong thing about corners that are coming up. I did some research and discovered this is intentional. In theory this is fine and I suppose it's realistic, but it's so jarring it doesn't feel like it's meant to happen. There were times too where a car had crashed on the stage ahead of me and I didn't get a warning about it until after I'd passed them. I don't see why there was focus in areas like this when the main bulk of the content is so dry and repetitive. A special shout also has to go to gravel stages where TV helicopters would hover about ten feet above the road at corners, meaning you're going into a massive cloud of dust at 90mph and you can't see the corner coming up. Rally has a long history of fans and media coverage getting as close as possible to the cars and road while they're running, but if a helicopter ever did that to me while I was driving on a stage I'd stop, get out and start throwing rocks at it. A truly infuriating inclusion. 

Everything I've described could still yet be saved if the physics were good. Dirt 4 offers two handling modes, Gamer and Simulation, just to further drive home how conflicted the game is after the Dirt Rally spinoff. Since it's a main series Dirt game and since I was playing with a controller, I played on Gamer. The game was unbelievably easy. On the highest difficulty I was winning stages by at least twenty seconds, each time. I enjoyed pushing myself since you could still easily go over the limit, but a month and a half is a long time to be time trialling. Strangely, the same difficulty level on Rallycross was actually a fair contest, while Land Rush as a mode was so infuriating I put the difficulty as low as possible to get it out the way. Different categories of car aren't noticeably different on Gamer handling, with one or two Group B cars (the most high performance rally category ever) being the only things I really struggled with. 

There are five different locations for rally stages to be generated on, and they all offer a different type of surface. There's a notable difference between those, probably a bigger difference than between the cars. The only one of these I'd really complain about are Sweden's snowbanks, which don't seem to reflect any physics found in the real world. If you clip a snowbank you stop and get wedged in it. If you have drive at speed and have a high ride height (it's rallying - you do) you might get beached on top of it. You don't get stuck to it like a magnet or get launched into the air and do several barrel rolls. 

I think I've covered everything. Dirt 4 isn't necessarily a bad game, but I don't see what purpose it served when it came out. The more realistic Dirt Rally series had started two years previously and largely usurped the bulk of 4's content. The more freestyle aspects of offroad racing I remember from Dirt 3 feel like an afterthought here, which in turn reflects the structure of most of the singleplayer content. The more accessible driving physics make the game too accessible. I realise I'm more experienced with racing games than most of the audience that would be interested in this game, but even with that in mind it feels too easy. 

With Dirt 5 releasing recently (and after Dirt Rally 2.0) there doesn't seem to be a lot of consistent direction with the series. Dirt 5 doesn't feel connected to 4 in the way that 4 didn't feel connected to 3. Ultimately, 4 felt like a way of passing some time. It wasn't a challenge, it wasn't memorable, it was just there. 

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On 24/11/2020 at 17:01, Miguel Sanchez said:

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Need for Speed Payback (PS4, 2017)

I have played three Need for Speed games in my life. The first was Shift, a more realistic circuit-racing based effort from the studio that would eventually put out the Project Cars games (a series which ironically has gone full arcade with its 3rd instalment, released in 2020). The second was Hot Pursuit, effectively a less colourful version of Burnout Paradise but with real cars.

The third was 2017's Payback. It took me 32 hours over about two and a half weeks to finish. It is, quite comfortably, one of the worst games I've ever played.

When I think about video games I often lament that there aren't really any car-focused open world games anymore. Take the original Driver for instance, one of the finest examples of the genre. A map, a car to drive around in. It works. Ever since Grand Theft Auto 3 though, you had to control the human too. You had to get out and shoot things. I wonder what it would be like if you had a proper 2020-scale open world focused on the car, or even at least vehicles. Could you still make a game like this and make it good?

Payback certainly isn't that game. You are Tyler Morgan, Mac, and Jess. You live in... er, a fictionalised version of Las Vegas and you all like driving and racing. There's a corrupt casino called The House that fixes all the street racing to make money off it, and our heroes fall foul of this. They then have to work their way back up through Fake Vegas' local street racing leagues to take on the House.

The main problem with the characterisation, the writing and the world building in Payback is how generic it is. At the start when the story and characters were being introduced they all felt so bland and uninteresting it was almost uncanny. The whole game feels like it was designed by committee to be as bland and inoffensive as possible. Weirdly though, there are times where it feels as if it tries to mock that kind of media. There are some 'characters' that talk like stereotypical online streamers/influencers and I'm clearly supposed to feel like I'm in on the joke with the game. It's like parents in a bad American sitcom trying show how down with the kids they are, breaking your spine with cringe in the process.

The best bit is when you're working your way through the racing leagues. Each league has a boss and your character talks to them at the start of a race. Except the cutscenes don't feature people and only show you the front of the cars next to each other on the road, so it's like there aren't any people at all and it's the cars that have come to life. That would be more interesting.

I only mention how bad all of this stuff is because the game tries to make it engaging and fails. I could easily overlook this if the gameplay compensated for it adequately. On the face of it there's a lot of potential here. There's a large range of cars and upgrade options for them. You can upgrade the starting cars as much as you want, but as you progress through the story you can buy faster, more expensive cars which ultimately have better stats. There are five types of racing you can build a car for - Race, Offroad, Drift, Drag and Runner. Each car type handles differently and the variety in gameplay does keep the game interesting as you switch between disciplines.

This, sadly, is where the potential ends. I have never played a game with cars in it with physics as bad as this. You play an arcade racer, you expect to be able to easily slide a car round corners. Especially a map with as many long, open curved sections as Payback. You can't. You have to effectively force handbrake turns everywhere, a combination of handbrake, regular brake and as much sudden violent steering as possible. Trying to manage this is just baffling, and it barely gets any better even when the cars are upgraded. That's just trying to move a car on the road, offroad is much worse. No matter how much power you try to put down, the car will fishtail. You won't get it back. Considering the offroad racing still requires you to go on the offroad paths or be slowed down, the lack of control makes keeping up your speed almost impossible.

The story is centred loosely around a particular car, the Koenigsegg Regera. This is a very powerful and fast car. It's also the biggest example of how bad the physics are in the game. I got one as I was trying to finish some of the speed run activities dotted around the map where you have to maintain a certain average speed over a stretch of road. You push, push and push to try and make the thing rotate in a corner, nothing happens until you go over the limit and you lose it.

There's a live tuning menu in each car that lets you change a few tuning aspects while you drive. They do make a difference to the handling, but it only seems to be a different kind of unmanageable. It didn't make the Regera any better with full downforce. I turned on 'Stability Control' and it made no difference. I like the idea of the tuning menu, and each discipline of car has different things to alter, but the differences it makes to your cars performance are negligible at best. And here's a thing. You press down to open the menu, but you have to hold it for two seconds to close it. Why? All this does is force you to come to a stop every time you want to change something, or you'll be distracted long enough to crash into something if you're still driving.

Drag racing was interesting. You have to do the gearshifts manually and time them properly to go as quickly as possible. That's good and interesting and what I imagine a Need for Speed should be. It's undermined a lot by happening on non-straight public streets with seemingly randomly-spawning cars, but it's a nice holiday from the terrible handling model found elsewhere.


Upgrading your cars is an especially obnoxious experience. You can buy Speed Cards with the in-game currency to upgrade one of six parts of your car. If the tune-up shop doesn't have an upgrade you like you can spin a slot machine to try and get one that will help your car. You need tickets for this and you earn a lot less of those than you do the in-game currency. Not to worry though, you can always spend as much real money as you like!

Here's an idea. Don't make a boring game then put microtransations in it to give players good cars. I don't even know why you'd bother spending money when you can just change the difficulty setting. Just create a closed in-game economy which is properly balanced where you can upgrade your cars by playing it. Super simple stuff.

So, how to sum up Need for Speed Payback? A game that controls horribly, writing that has the nerve to try to be clever but is nowhere near intelligent enough to manage it and a story that's fundamentally boring anyway, an uninteresting map and while there's some variety in the gameplay it's so dull and repetitive that the entire thing just feels like a checklist to complete. The game has no redeeming qualities and the bad aspects of it are outright obnoxious. The boring content, awful story and terrible upgrade system just make the game feel lazy and cynical, and since it's published by EA I suppose it is. Like the most rudimentary means of taking up someone's time, offering nothing new or engaging but having as basic a sense of progression as possible so you don't feel like you're wasting effort.

Oh! I forgot the soundtrack. In games like this you want something that's either iconic or something that just sits there in the background without you noticing it. It does neither. It's bad. Bad enough to turn it off. You can almost admire how bad it is, it stands out against the rest of the horrific backdrop I've described.

This is the best post I've read on here. I agree word for word. I recently got this free on PS Plus and initially enjoyed the idea as I quite enjoyed the games as a child but it soon dawned how terrible the game is. I actually screen clipped the cut scenes to show my mate so we could laugh about it. I was half expecting Paul Walker to pop up at some point. The patter is so brutal it must be some massive in joke.

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6 hours ago, Stormzy said:

This is the best post I've read on here. I agree word for word. I recently got this free on PS Plus and initially enjoyed the idea as I quite enjoyed the games as a child but it soon dawned how terrible the game is. I actually screen clipped the cut scenes to show my mate so we could laugh about it. I was half expecting Paul Walker to pop up at some point. The patter is so brutal it must be some massive in joke.

I was spoiled for choice with the pictures...

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Gone at spending 32 hours of your life playing a game you hate.
Anyways I got Hitman 2 (the new one) in the steam sale and have been enjoying that. Lots of replayability as every time you finish a mission it opens up different starting points and other options. I'm a terrible hitman as my favourite part is when it all goes wrong and turns into a huge gun battle. The idea of not killing non-target people is lost on me too.


I want to love games like this and Dishonoured but I’m shit at them and it makes me mad.

Think it’s a leftover from being bad at MGS but also loving that game.
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I bought the coolest game of the year, Train Sim World 2 for the Xbox last week.

It's a bit rough around the edges like all these sim games are, but it's very accessable and has decent enough console controls.

It's very relaxing pelting through the German countryside on an ICE train with a podcast on in the background.

There's plenty of DLC available as well if you fancy driving grotty British Rail trains across 1980s Northern England instead.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I got platinum on Ghost of Tsushima last night. Had so much fun throughout and pretty much never got bored which is pretty impressive for a game I spent more than 65 hours with. I also still got amazed by how good it looked until the bitter end too.

This all managed to offset any derivative mission design and storytelling.

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