Need for Speed™ Payback
Fair · Action · 2020
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $7.79. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 18.9h
- Value
- $0.41/hr
- Reviews
- 85% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 6 GB of memory, 30 GB of storage. Windows only.
Set in the underworld of Fortune Valley, you and your crew were divided by betrayal and reunited by revenge to take down The House, a nefarious cartel that rules the city’s casinos, criminals and cops. In this corrupt gambler’s paradise, the stakes are high and The House always wins.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $2.99. That was September 2022. Its cuts run 75 percent off as a rule. There have been 48 in the 6 years tracked, about 6 weeks apart. Today's $7.79 at 74 percent off still sits 161 percent above the floor, so a deeper cut exists in its history.
At full price it scores 52. The current cut is what makes it a 62.
On value it sits in the top 5 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 97 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 90 percent. Among the games that feel like it, CarX Drift Racing Online ($16.99, scores 94) beats it on value, while it beats Need for Speed™ Rivals ($6.99, scores 41).
The press gave it 62; the people who bought it give it 85 percent. A 23-point gap in the buyer's favour.
This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 11 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written August 2025 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 48 percent of the 2,165 reviews written there were positive, against 85 percent overall, and those are 8 percent of everything written about it. It carries the aggressive kind of in-app purchases, and the score already docks it for that. The sticker price is where the spending starts.
Finishing takes 18.9 hours; clearing it takes 47, which is 2.5 times the campaign.
The drop-off
81% start to 2% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
204 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I played the OG, Most Wanted, Heat and Payback, and going into payback i saw alot of negative reviews and hate talk about the game mechanics and control. I personally enjoyed it, was it the best nfs? No, did it have a few eh and mhmm reactions from me, yes. But at the end of the day it was still enjoyable and a fairly easy 100%, plus for a racing game the story was well worked on imo, others may call it cringe, but...
the ♥♥♥ EA launcher prevents it from launching correctly on a gamescope/steamos big picture session. awful upgrade system as well, took me over a year just to beat the game because of it
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Need for Speed™ Payback scores 62/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1262580/need-for-speed-paybackThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 15, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.