Payday 2: A 4-man job to steal my heart.

So my utter loathing of the FPS genre is fairly well documented. I only played 3 of them  90% of the time I won't give an FPS the time of day, 8% of the time I try one to see what the hype is all about. But oh so rarely, but the slimmest of margins I will get a FPS game because its one that I enjoy or really want to try. 

And since I watched the guys at Achievement Hunter make a let's play of this title and have been purchasing more games through Steam lately, I have been keeping an eye on this one. The Steam holiday sale marked the price down, but I wasn't ready to jump in just yet. Then on Xmas morning, a friend of mine saw one of my threads mentioning how on the fence I was about getting it. So out of the blue he purchased a 4 pack and gave me one, thus giving me the opportunity to sit down with.....

PAYDAY 2

There really isn't very much of a story when it comes to Payday 2 at least from what I've seen. You play one of four professional thieves brought in to do some scores from some of the local areas crime lords. They characters have names and minimal backstories, but ultimately they are completely irrelevant. This must be some kind of record for this blog, because I am already done talking about the story.

So typically the game fires up with you being introduced to your safe house. This I think was intended to be used as a character's online showing off space because there are places to show how much money you have amassed in the game, and places to display your custom masks and modified weapons. But after your first walk through you will probably never end up coming in here again. I certainly didn't.

Your first trip through the safehouse basically will give your instructions on how the controls work. I am not an active PC gamer but from what I have been told the controls are fairly standard PC FPS. So if you are a fairly active PC gamer you probably won't be lost here. WASD controls, R to reload, F to grab and interact, G to put down or use items, Shift to run, crtl to crouch. That essentially appears to be it as far as controls go.

I am Super Kawaii. Judge me.

When you wish to start a mission, you will need to go into Crime.net (or Crime.net offline). This brings up a map of the available lobbies set up by other players currently in. You will get washed by a LOT of available missions so it probably couldn't hurt to get your feet wet in the offline modes.

When selecting a mission they will be signified with white and yellow dots. White marking how well that job pays and the yellow marking its difficulty from 0-3. All of them missions have a specific code name so when you select it the goal and location are always the same, just some of the internal pieces move around such as safe location or locked doors. After completion of the missions, you earn your daily pay rate and whatever bonus loot you pick up during the mission.

Shouldn't have a problem finding a game. Finding a game with jerks though, there in lies the challenge.

At mission completion, the majority is moved to you "offshore account" which allows you to choose your own mission with its own difficult (but selecting them on the map as they appear are free). The remainder is your spending cash, which you can use to purchase better guns or use with skill points to advance your character. And that shit is expensive, so expect to play a lot to level your skills up.

So the majority of the actual missions may have different themes or winning conditions, but most generally follow the same lines: Go in, Steal what you are after, fend off the cops till your escape gets there, then escape with the loot. Oh sure, at the start of almost every mission you can walk around the joint, find where the cameras are, where the guards patrol, and try to concoct some clever way you can loot the joint without even being seen.

You can shill some extra cash before a mission for intel or extra gear. 

That, Never, Happens.

Nope, be it your own mistake or one of the jackasses you are playing with, someone will trip an alarm, let a pedestrian get away, or be seen by a guard. The alarms will sound and the cops will be coming. It's at this point in the mission the game will quickly turn into a game of survival mode. A good majority of the time you will either be waiting for a drill to bust into a large safe or vault so you can go in and loot the materials, so you can take this opportunity to loot the small goods or barricade entry points to fend off the police assault.

The police will tend to move in waves, so every time you see the yellow warning in the upper right corner, that means they are coming after you. Starts off simple, regular street cops with handguns. But then they will start to bring in SWAT teams. Then some kind of black and yellow shock troopers, sometimes with some blue Judge Dredd looking guy who can tazer you. The worst leading up to these incredibly heavy armored slow moving bulldozers who are just designed to eat bullets.

Your level of success is really determined by how many people are playing the game. I have played a number of missions single player with 2 AI partners, and almost every time I would start to fail at the point where I have to move the gained loot from the source to the van. It gets exceptionally harder single player because as the level increases so too does the number of bags you'll need to steal, which means more trips to the van, which usually means more bullets in your body.

And while I'm at it? The AI partners in the game are fuckin' retarded. They do not help carry the loot bags, and they really take their time shooting anything. They don't zip tie any of the hostages, and a lot of the times, they just kinda wander around instead of helping fend off the police. The only reason to use them is they are typically close enough to you that when you get shot down, they will be able to pick you back up. Unfortunately, even you have a hostage if they don't get to you in time the game is still over. In mulitplayer hostages can be negotiated to bring players back into the fray.

Crowd control will NEVER go like you want it to.

If I had to make a complaint about the game and this is really a nitpick, is that the number of missions is pretty low. There are 4 crime bosses with a select number of missions, some of them are duplicates of other missions just on a pro job level (which basically means no continues and more XP). By the time you reach a decent level, all of the first few missions are a not even worth doing on the hardest levels because you will fly through them so easily. There is an extra DLC mission for 7 bucks, that seems a tad pricey to me for just one level.

I suppose this is more of a personal gripe too, but the other problem I have is actually getting multiplayer games together. I have friends who have the game, I keep asking people to play. But I usually only get one out of 6 friends to actually jump in the game with me. Playing it with a group of people is really the way to do it.

The assaults are when the action picks up, and the Police can be pretty relentless.

Seriously though, there are shooters I like, there are a LOT of shooters I hate. But I think might stretch to say this is the first shooter I love. I am almost always willing to jump into a game of this. The longer 3 day missions are an absolute blast with friends, and I'm already considering to restart my character just to play it over again with the increased challenge. I got the game for free thanks to a very generous friend, but I'm seriously kicking myself for not picking this up sooner. This game is an absolute blast and if I had played it sooner this could have seriously been in the running for my 2013 game of the year.

Payday 2 is fucking awesome. Play it.