Personally I’d appreciate more story and less cherry-picking of game styles, but it’s hard to criticize Payback² too much for committing to the chaos. It’s true that this dog pile of unsystematic violence might feel rather unstructured as has been noted on the forums, and that’s because it is. It’s an intro that demonstrates the rampant destruction Payback² actively encourages, after which it’s time to head out on foot for a team-based death match.Īnd so it goes from there, with most any kind of shooting, driving or multiplayer-based game structure you can think of haphazardly piled on top of one another as you climb the criminal ranks. For example, you start out in a tank, surrounded by enemies in need of destruction.īeing a tank you don’t have to worry quite so much about self-sustained injury, crashing or enemy gunfire, and you’re free to trundle around blasting like crazy and blowing things up. Instead, it makes use of somewhat randomized game modes, so each new mission – or level, or however you want to label the independent vignettes of action – throws you into quite a different arena. This certainly can’t be accused of being a slave to its inspiration, however. But what was so great about the first two games is that they were all about disorganized crime, and that sweet, reckless, chaotic flavor also permeates Payback².
GTA chose to tweak the series when it went fully 3D by dropping you into the world of organized crime. The bird’s-eye-view format clearly still has a lot of life left in it. You decide whether that’s good or bad, but from my perspective it’s a wise decision. Payback² borrows – admittedly very heavily – from the original, and not the third-person 3D versions that came later. Nor should it, given that the GTA franchise took off in a very different direction after the second installment.
I mean, this game’s got to be worth playing for that reason alone, right?Ĭlearly this is a GTA clone, and makes no real apology for that. It makes you feel tough, big and clever, and it fits Payback²’s action like a boxing glove.
I don’t know about you, but all I can think about when I mow someone down or blow someone away in Payback² ($4.99) is Jesse Ventura as Blaine in the movie Predator throwing back the cover of his minigun, spitting out his chewing tobacco (real nasty habit he’s got there) and delivering that immortal one-liner, “Payback time!”