If your Mac won’t start up, is getting slow or freezing up, then safe mode could be just what you need to get back on track. Unfortunately they can’t compensate for the structural and narrative missteps which feel more grating the longer you play, until eventually the breezy powerslides and 150mph overtakes simply aren’t enough anymore.Starting your Mac in safe mode can often get you out of a jam. Then there are Side Bets, a tonally consistent new mechanic which throws in added objectives each race and alleviate the sense of repetition. The exterior view’s camera sells you a sense of danger and being on the edge of control, and simply being in control of a car feels weighty and compelling.

What Payback does well is what the series has always excelled at: satisfying arcade handling and a sense of speed. These drops, and the occasional car you drive right though in the game world, suggest a less than stellar technical foundation. The range of ten options is modest but enough to dial in an acceptable fidelity/performance balance on most systems, and but the engine seems prone to frame drops and slow downs on all settings. On a GTX 1070 and i5 6500 running at 2560x1600, Payback can’t quite keep to 60fps at ultra settings, so some degree of graphics settings adjustment is required to hit that smooth v-synced frame delivery. Central trio Mac, Tyler, and Jess have voice talent trying their hardest to make their lines sound like human beings communicating, but there’s evidently only so much you can do with lines like “Wow, the torque on this thing!” and “Guess I’ll just have to beat you all.” The Hollywood set-pieces are jarring cut-scenes that rob you of the satisfaction of pulling them off, and the corny dialogue comes across as inept, rather than knowing. That appeal, the central kitsch of F&F, is lost in translation in Payback. Those movies which, famously, exist on a precarious ‘so bad it’s good’ appeal hanging above every set-piece like the sword of Damocles.

After all, if Vin Diesel one liner-ing his way through wafer-thin scripts about cars driving through skyscrapers makes for a box office smash, why can’t a game appeal to that same appetite? Everything about Payback-the quasi-Vegas setting Fortune City the revenge plot the love for tuners getting airborne and smashing things-harks back to those movies. The problems begin with the esteem Need For Speed Payback holds the Fast and Furious franchise in.

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