Payday 2 was first released back in 2013 for previous generation consoles and was rereleased last year for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One with the Crimewave Edition subtitle. It has now be rereleased yet again as the Big Score Bundle, which includes all the downloadable content released to date. This includes new weapons, characters and heists, and adds a fair amount of content to an already stacked game.
If this is your first experience with Payday 2, then it will be well worth your time visiting your safe house and taking part in some of the tutorials contained within. These will teach you about safe-cracking, lock-picking and disabling cameras, and at later points, you’ll be able to try out any new weapons you’ve purchased, view your collection of masks, and bask in the glory of all the cash that you’ve accrued. From your safe house, you’re also able to access the Crime.net server, which functions as Payday 2’s mission select screen.
Crime.net is available in both online and offline versions, depending on whether you want to play with other people or not, and contracts appear and disappear at a fairly rapid pace, which gives a good illusion of jobs being snapped up by other teams. Contracts range in difficulty and requirements, such as being required to use stealth or if they’re pro jobs, which don’t allow teams to retry, but provide better rewards upon completion.
While Payday 2 can be played offline, it works a lot better if you play with other people, especially if they’re a team that you’re familiar with. This is obviously partly because you can then match playstyles with people that you know, but it also helps to lessen the effects of the terrible AI that plague almost every session with the game. When playing offline you have to deal with it on both sides of the law, as both your fellow crew members and the other team are seemingly inept, but at least online you can have some modicum of faith in your fellow heisters, and only have to deal with the idiocy of your enemies.
Payday 2 isn’t an easy experience, in terms of both gameplay requirements and the difficulty of combat. It only takes a few shots to down your character, so precision shooting and taking cover is a priority. It also helps to know where your enemy is, and this is near to impossible considering that enemies will often come wandering into the middle of a room that you’re holed up in and will only start shooting once they’re behind you. This isn’t strafing or impressive staged tactics, but instead AI instructions of enemies making their way to you and shooting. Enemies also spawn behind you in rooms that you’ve already cleared, which means that you can never feel totally safe in thinking that you’ve cleared a series of rooms. This unpredictability makes Payday 2 more difficult that it already is by design, and often leads to cheap feeling deaths and a general sense of unfairness on the part of the game.
As mentioned at the start, Payday 2 was originally released on last-generation consoles, and frankly, it looks like it. There hasn’t been much of an attempt to freshen up the visuals, leaving levels looking clunky and dated and character models looking uninspiring and difficult to tell apart. This is a particular problem when you’re expected to pick a certain individual out of a panicked crowd in order to convince them to help you. There are also a number of graphical issues that I ran into, such as flashlight beams shining through walls and characters walking through solid objects, particularly vehicles. I even had the pleasure of experiencing a couple of levels where the majority of the map didn’t load, leaving floating internal corridors and giant holes in the ground.
Though Payday 2 can boast a large amount of content for players to experience, it’s unfortunate that much of it is a mess, from presentation to technical issues. Perhaps the biggest shame is that heists have been done so much better in Grand Theft Auto V, which leaves a game like this, fully devoted to breaking and entering, a little defunct. If you’ve got a group of friends looking for a crime spree experience, there is some fun that can be salvaged from Payday 2, but for the most part, you’re better off spending your time elsewhere.
