Payday 2
Overall:
Payday 2 is a unique criminal FPS game that puts the player in the shoes of a member of an organized crime gang. There are all sorts of characters to choose from that change nothing other than the audio cues throughout the game. The player acts as one of these characters and commits crimes all over the map, robbing banks, jewelry stores, armored trucks, and other criminals. The game is a lot of fun, but does have some issues that we’ll get into.
Missions:
There are a good bit of different missions, or heists for the player to run through. These can be done solo, with friends, or with random players. The player can choose from the crime map, called “Crime.net”, for free or, for a little bit of in game currency, there is the option to purchase contracts for specific heists. These purchased contracts are nice, when you want to play a certain heist for achievement reasons, and the more expensive the heist, the higher the completion payout. There are enough different heists to keep anyone entertained for awhile, and even when all heists have been completed, there’s always the option to run back through them and higher difficulties. The amount of heists and difficulties give this game a good replay value.
Stealth Vs. Loud:
This one is pretty self explanatory, in theses heists you have two options, stealth and loud. You can try to sneak your way through the heist and get out with no one knowing you were there or you can go in guns blazing and kill everything in sight. Each tactic has their own challenges with more guards on higher difficulties to avoid in stealth and more cops running in when loud. Some heists allow both options with others forcing you to go stealth or loud.
In-Game Currency:
There are three types of in-game currency: bank account, offshore bank account, and continental coins, with each having their own uses. The normal bank account is mainly used to buy guns, attachments and masks. The offshore bank account is mainly used to buy contracts, and a new addition, in-game betting. The continental coins are also a pretty new addition. These coins allow you to upgrade your safehouse and buy weapon mods if you don’t have the money for it. The two bank accounts are increased mainly from finishing heists, with every completed heist putting money into both accounts. The continental coins are made from safe house raids and special quests, these quests also give masks, weapon mods, and money.
Safe house.
The safe house is a playable area in the game that offers mostly aesthetics but some cool little games. Each house includes upgradable areas, that give you a firing range, a safe, a gambling area, and a little hockey minigame. Certain upgrades also give you new paint jobs for your getaway van. These upgradable areas are cool but I do warn, if you are playing on a subpar device, these upgrades can get costly on your frame-rate during safe house raids. Safe house raids are technically heists where it’s just a “hold your ground” sort of mission. You stop the cops from coming in and stealing your money. These are mainly for continental coins, as each defended raid yields six coins.
DLCs and Updates:
Let’s give Overkill some credit, this game is a constant work in progress. It seems like every time you turn around there’s an update for the game, whether it’s adding stuff to the game or fixing bugs, the developers at Overkill are constantly working to improve this game. That is a sight for sore eyes when most games nowadays are pushed out and abandoned once the money has been made. There are however, a good bit of DLCs, this as nice considering that there are constantly new additions to the game, with DLCs bringing new guns, heists, and characters. The downside is, they aren’t free. Most of the time at release the DLCs are around 5 USD, which isn’t an insane price, but with the sheer amount of DLCs offered that can get a little heavy on the wallet. Overkill does combat this however, with regular sales on their DLCs slashing down the prices to an amount where buying multiple at a time aren’t as bad. Now, the updates themselves do pose an issue. The game itself is rather large, pushing 20 GBs at the time of this writing and growing with each update and DLC. Now, I don’t know if this is a problem with steam or Payday 2 as it seems to happen with other games but not nearly to this extent. There are two parts to each update, downloading, and disk writing. The updates themselves can be pretty large, and if you don’t have fast internet that can take a while, and then the disk writing can take even longer than that. This is frustrating when a large update comes out and for someone who doesn’t have that good of internet can be forced to go a day or two without playing because that's just how long it takes to update.
Bugs and Glitches:
With any game that has constant updates, the list of bugs and glitches that could potentially affect game-play continue to evolve. The main one is game crashing. Especially after a new update you can’t go long without your game freezing up and then force-closing. It’s annoying especially if you’re in the middle of a heist. Another big one is de-sync. This causes a player in multiplayer to be behind on what is actually going on. Server side you could be on one side of the map, while client side you’re on the other. This makes stealth heists much more difficult as you can be spotted by guards, that for you, you’re nowhere near. However I am fairly certain that overkill is working hard to figure these out and patch it as with any update that this game has there is a long list of bug fixes which is good and bad. It’s scary to see a game have that many bugs, but it’s really nice to see the developers fix even the smallest of bugs that affect almost no game-play.
Achievements:
This game is pretty well-known in the world of achievement hunters, mainly because of the sheer amount of them. This game offers 500+ achievements and with the constant addition of new heists with DLCs, the number of achievements continue to grow as well. The best part for achievement hunters is that most achievements are unique. Of course you have the difficulty based achievements that just require you to beat a heist at max level, which is not easy in the slightest, and you get the achievement for every difficulty. But then come the other achievements that require hard work and patience to achieve. These achievements aren’t easy and require sometimes hours for a single achievement, so earning these achievements and seeing that count go up is very rewarding for this game.
Conclusion:
Payday 2 is an amazing game to play with friends. It give you the feel of being able to run around town killing and stealing all you want and face no consequences which is really nice. The game is constantly being added upon and morphed. There are also a lot of achievements to be earned and worked hard for. This game is a lot of fun, if you can keep it from crashing.
Rating:
-Mufffinzz
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