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. You may have heard that Payback has dialled back on the pure street racing focus in favour of a self-described “action driving” experience. But elsewhere? Well, unfortunately, Payback has gambled and lost. Plus, the world is filled with extra activities and events, drag racing is included from the get-go, and yes, you can pause it. There’s a much longer experience here – it took me around 17 hours to complete the story alone. Of course, it was very short, the world was largely empty, there initially wasn’t any drag racing, and you couldn’t even pause the game in single-player. Between all the hokey live-action, first-person fist-bumping it also revolved around encounters with real-world automotive icons. You see, Need for Speed 2015 brought with it a resurrection of the spirit of 20’s successful Underground games and saw the return of meaningful performance and visual customisation. While Payback does fix a host of the 2015 Need for Speed reboot’s missteps, it also brushes away a lot of the stuff developer Ghost Games got right at that time. Need for Speed Payback is one step forwards and two steps back for EA’s 23-year-old racing series.