They’re supernaturally fast (as usual, standard issue Crown Vics are able to go doorhandle-to-doorhandle with seven-figure supercars) but player-controlled cars are incredibly powerful battering rams, tearing through cop cars like a bad curry through a colon. The cop AI seems robust enough, and they’ll work on boxing you in when they have the numbers, but I didn’t find them too dangerous. Payback changes things up slightly in the penultimate race event, where it adds cops in the middle of an actual race, but otherwise police pursuits are basically now just time trials where the AI is trying to stop you.

There aren’t any cops around during free-roam, either they’re only present in story missions or at certain triggers spread around the map that will initiate another linear, pre-set chase. No more darting down random side-streets at the last second to shake the fuzz, or parking in a dimly-lit area with the engine off, like Need for Speed 2015. Taking down cop cars in these events has a welcome enough Burnout 3 flavour to it – muscling your pursuers into spectacular slow-motion collisions with poles and parked cars is fun – but I don’t think it was worth losing proper pursuits for. “The cop chases feel largely neutered too escaping police is now a totally linear exercise, where we have to follow a set path via checkpoints within a time limit instead of improvising and doing something unpredictable to throw them off. They’re really just built to service Payback’s paper-thin story, which starts with a confounding succession of betrayals and ends without ever really going anywhere interesting.

Fast and frantic, but shallow and not worth replaying. They’re well-executed, particularly how they seamlessly swap you between characters and vehicles (like the opening moments of Forza Horizon 3), but they’re completely scripted. We’re just driving from cutscene to cutscene. They may look exciting on the surface, but they aren’t really that demanding unlike, say, the Stuntman games, Payback doesn’t require us to do any of the trickier stuff ourselves – the game takes over all the cool bits. The reality is that racing still pads out the bulk of the driving in Payback and the new “action driving” stuff is limited to a small handful of movie-inspired sequences and Payback’s new police pursuit system. Play You may have heard that Payback has dialled back on the pure street racing focus in favour of a self-described “action driving” experience.

Multiplier 2 in need for speed payback