Payday 3: The Final Preview

Payday 3 comes with a laundry list of decisions that players will have to answer quickly when walking into the next job, mask off or on, creep around corners and avoid armed confrontation or bust in guns blazing, engage in a hostage negotiation to buy some time or power through as quickly as possible after 10 years and more than 200 updates since the payday gang infiltrated Washington DC, and after acquiring a few new associates along the way, the crew is picking up where they left off and heading for the greater New York City metropolitan area for payday 3.

Even crossing the Hudson River for a sting in New Jersey, they may have learned a few more tricks of the trade, but it's up to the player to utilize them effectively, and more often than not, going in with the goal of pulling off a job under the radar ends in reluctantly busting out guns. One false move is all it takes to blow it foreign.

As much as I wanted to take advantage of the stealth tactics introduced here, I usually ended up bungling it by taking too long to pick a lock or being caught by a security camera. I didn't spot much in the real world. Heist not that I would know all of the minutia must be carefully accounted for to pull off a job as smooth as a Danny Ocean plant.

At least the payday games haven't exactly conditioned their players to take a gentle approach to robbery, so when things went south, my team was ready to mow down endless waves of NYPD for the biggest take we could manage. I played two heists alongside two other human players, and an AI character was our fourth, though half of the time the AI's contributions were useless.

In one particularly heinous moment halfway through our second game, the AI literally just stood there in the middle of a high-stakes shootout. Other times it came through for a down player with a medkit, but based on the inconsistency. I'd recommend linking up with other people either locally or online with microphones, as always good communication is paramount to ensuring things go well, and quick replies won't really cut it here.

Yelling is fun, but it's not exactly directionally helpful to teammates. Even so, things mostly did not go smoothly for us, which I chalk up to being dumped into the game with no tutorial or cut scene to get a better sense of the mission before. Both heists, the Capital Bank Heist we previously previewed and a new one stealing degradable electronic components in a container shipping yard in Bayonne.

New Jersey, were commissioned by a character played by Ice-T. Loads of paragraphs of text presented information about the assignment, but since we were playing on the clock, I skimmed, making our objectives probably more confusing than they needed to be. A regular playthrough will almost certainly not be this overwhelming.

The shipping yard is a doozy. It's less straightforward than the familiar bank heist, as the map was a maze of stacked shipping containers, some that led to a dead end and others that had unlockable latches that weren't immediately clear in the middle of a cop. Siege, though it makes for frenzied gameplay on the first go, is definitely a stroke of realism.

Luckily, if we blew the mission too badly, we could vote to restart on the menu screen that said blasting your way out of trouble isn't difficult, save for a sporadic ninja-like super cop who can deal powerful blows; otherwise, most of the enemy NPCs are fairly slow and dumb, and the reload speeds usually don't turn me into a Sitting Duck, but if enough of them congregate, it gets harder to escape simply based on the sheer power of numbers.

Payday 3 is full of opportunities to get deep in the weeds. At launch, six playable characters will be available, including Stalwart's Dallas Hoxton, Chains, and Wolf, and later Payday 2 editions. Pearl and Joy, though neither of the latter two were options in my preview, are prime examples of these endless Wells: the enormous skill tree weapon and item loadout customized outfits, masks, and skins, which again I barely had time to really dig into because of the sheer breadth of options and limited time constraints.

Star Breeze has promised another lengthy campaign for payday 3, at least as long as the last game, and with big plans like that for heists across the tri-state area, we'll be raking in New York City's boatloads of cash and various paraphernalia for years and years. For more previews of this fall's biggest games, don't miss our hands-on preview of Super Mario Brothers Wonder and Ghost Runner 2.