Payday 3: Murky Station Is Back
Welcome to Turbid Station, better known as Murky Station, a classic Payday 2 stealth heist that has made its way over to Payday 3 as this game's first stealth-only experience. Of the two Legacy Heists that added an update, 2 Turbid Station was absolutely the one I was most excited for. Although it doesn't seem to have the same legendary status Cookoff has, for the most part.
I think this is an incredible evolution of the old murky station built from the ground up to accommodate Payday 3's plethora of brand new stealth mechanics. Outside of some uneven objective difficulty, this heist is one of the best at showcasing what makes Payday 3 Stealth truly phenomenal. I'm surprised to see how well the public, private, and secure areas have been integrated, and the casing mode actually has a part to play.
Within this haste, more than anything, they've nailed the atmosphere on this one with the details of the surrounding high-rises and almost foggy Waterfront Bringing this heist to life. Payday 3 is really flexing its graphical and lighting improvements on locations such as this one heading into the train yard.
You'll be started off in a familiar overlook, giving you the chance to scope out the area without being forced to mask up, while the heavily guarded trainyard itself is a secure zone with rest on site policies. The tunnels underneath the station are only private, meaning you'll only be escorted out if detected.
What I will say is that the tunnels are a fairly sprawling area, so if you do get caught and escorted to be prepared for a long walk with security, if you don't have Glitch protocol equipped, as was the case in Payday 2, your objectives are fairly self-explanatory. You just need to locate and open up the train carriages containing the train, get a high-tech satellite system in this instance, and then discover a way to breach their four independently unique security systems.
Two of the carts will contain the objective loot, and the other two will house additional securable loot in the form of solar panels and these high-tech-looking orbit stabilizers. One nice detail is that all four carriages are properly branded with the Quant logo, making it much easier to discern where they are quickly.
As in Payday 2, you can find an equipment schedule on the south side of the yard to help locate the four unique security keys, either in the train yard or the basement. These consist of an employee phone hack for a QR code similar to 19 199 boxes. An SSD found next to the camera controls a red key card stored loose on a rack and a control panel that requires secure PC authorization to open, which can only be reached via an iris scan, as seen on No Rest for the Wicked.
Remember, in Payday 2, these objectives were simple pickup and plugin interactions, so Payday 3 has added quite a bit of variable difficulty to its more complex additions. In my time with the heist, the construction employee was always upstairs while the control room was always down in the basement.
Once you've located at least the two satellite room keys, you can grab the loot sneaking around the potentially alarm motion sensors, depending on the difficulty of securing them either up in the van where you started the heist or down by a speed boat situated on the waterfront. The boat being as secure as it was on Payday 2 is, in my experience, vastly preferable.
If you're spotted and stealth breaks prior to this, you'll be faced with a difficulty scaling point of no return, allowing you to escape the heist without the stealth bonus if you already have the satellite secured but are failing. The Heist if you don't make it the Escape before the timer runs out, favors can be used to actually increase this timer and get away with an early slip up on the heist, as well as reducing the number of drones on the heist increasing the control room security timer and adding more laws for distraction, and it's cool though this remains a simple and relatively short stealth only Heist but outside of just boiling it down to its most basic objectives, there's a lot more to this one than meets the eye for instance it sees the return of camera drones in stealth, these things are actually easier to avoid than their Payday 2 counterparts as they seem to be constantly moving so as long as you don't move alongside them they shouldn't have the time to spot you but still remains something to be vigilant of when taking out guards.
Even better, they can now also be directly shut down, taking them off the security grid but also opening up the possibility that their broken remains are spotted and called in by a guard. Map traversal is also something that's been massively overhauled and improved. With ladders gone from Payday 3 and strangely not returning here, transitions between areas have been altered to enable you to vault up and down them so that the same flanking routes still exist.
This has been taken a step further out by the train yard, where you're heavily encouraged to climb up on the roof of trains, granting you a bird's-eye view of the heist and allowing you to be more tactical in how you move around it. The only complaint I have here is that fall damage can be quite brutal from the trends themselves, and there are a few places where you can get stuck in the heometry, meaning you can find yourself punished for this cat burglar play style.
Similarly, some new paths have been opened up underneath the train carts, giving you perfect places to hide from drone cams or flank around patrols with lower risk. Again, this host really leans into that re-form stealth payday 3 has tried to encourage, and I anticipate every player will develop their own preferred method to move around the map silently.
Hell, you can even go for a full casing mode run if you roll the right objectives and want to stay on Terra firm at all times, but I'm not sure why you would want to do that when masking up gives you access to so many more areas and methods of traversal. Also, keep in mind that if you do choose to head down through the vents in the basement, this space is great for getting you around the area and out of sight of cameras, but you will be forced to mask up to ever escape as you need to vault your way out, possibly a slight oversight.
Speaking of cameras, while the drones aren't too much trouble, the basement cams are a nightmare, especially when playing Overkill, as they are Titan cams with curus cores, limiting their hack time to just 5 seconds. This Mak solo play down the tunnels is much more challenging, and with no camera guard to take out, they will remain a constant problem for you.
