40 Games like Trailmakers on Xbox that you should try

Need for Speed Payback is an action-driving racing game and the twenty-third part of the NFS franchise. ###Gameplay Despite the trend made by NFS' before Payback features an offline mode. The game is set in a fictional city named Fortune Valley.

The entry most fans point to: an open city with genuine variety in activities, co-op through the entire campaign, and a tone that swings between crude comedy and surprisingly dark story beats. The PC port is the problem — it shipped badly and still needs community patches to run properly, which is a real barrier before you start.

The largest of the PS2-era entries by a distance: three cities, countryside between them, and systems the series never repeated — stat training, gang territory, vehicle variety from bikes to planes. It is also the most uneven. Mission difficulty spikes without warning, and the RPG-ish stat grind sits oddly against the pace of everything else.

Become the ultimate icon of today’s urban car culture in Need for Speed™, featuring Five Ways to Play and a huge open world to race and explore from dusk ‘till dawn. * FIVE WAYS TO PLAY – Earn reputation and master all Five Ways to Play - Speed, Style, Build, Crew and Outlaw - to win your own way.

Tighter and more focused than the open worlds that followed it, with a compact city you learn by heart rather than by map marker. Driving carries most of the game. The shooting has aged badly — no proper cover, stiff aiming — and missions restart from the beginning, which turns a late failure into a long redo.

A physics sandbox first and a shooter a distant second. The grapple and parachute let you chain traversal indefinitely, and most of the fun comes from improvising with them rather than from any mission. Expect repetition: the island is enormous but the objectives recycle a handful of templates, and the story is barely present.

New Bordeaux and its period soundtrack are exceptional, and the story handles race and its era with more seriousness than the genre usually manages. Driving feels heavy and right. The structure undercuts all of it — the same racket-clearing loop repeats across every district, and the mission variety runs out long before the map does.

The first outing for the grapple-and-parachute traversal the series became known for, though far cruder here — the hook is limited and stunt-jumping between vehicles is the main trick. The island is large and mostly empty, missions repeat a handful of templates, and the driving physics are loose enough that chases become guesswork.

Set in Bullworth Academy, a fictional British private school, this game tells about school bullying and the troublesome period of growing to adolescence. You assume the role of Jimmy Hopkins, a 15-year-old boy and a “problem child”, who was already kicked out of many schools for his misbehavior.

Bang-On Balls: Chronicles rolls onto the stage! A 3D platformer inspired by some of the best games of the genre including some Italian plumbers, a blue hedgehog, or a bear with a bird on his backpack!

A standalone expansion set in Hell, built around flight: you unlock wings early and the whole map is designed for vertical movement rather than driving. That traversal is the best part. It is very short — a few hours — and reuses the systems and much of the structure of Saints Row IV without adding a real campaign.

Superpowers replace most of the driving: you sprint faster than cars and glide over buildings, which makes the open world trivial to cross and much more fun to move through. Combat is chaotic rather than precise. It reuses the previous game's city wholesale, and once you have full powers almost nothing offers resistance.