Ranking/reviewing The Payday Games (payday 1, 2, 3)
Howdy, my total is always Tubular Gamers, and we're back with you. You guested another ranking kind of review article, and today we're going to be talking about the payday series. For the uninformed, the Payday series is a trilogy of cooperative first-person shooters developed by Overkill Software. I think the best description I could give of these games is that they are kind of like Left for Dead, only with cops and robbers.
You know, instead of going through some zombie campaigns, you're doing heists, whether it's at banks, whether you're cooking meth, or now stealing cryptocurrency. You're doing heists instead of zombies; you have the police. It's cooperative in the same vein as Left 4 Dead; you can be stealthy in these games; they require even more cooperation; and then there's, of course, some progression in these games.
While payday may never have hit the heights of say left for dead in its peak, it still does have a pretty substantial player base, especially Payday 2 on PC, where the game has had updates for like 10 years now when it comes to my history of payday. I remember when the original came out. I got it at release on PC, played a good 20 to 30 hours of it, really enjoyed it, got Payday 2 at release, played well over 100 hours, and here we are now with Payday 3.
And so here we have the latest payday game, Payday 3, releasing very recently. I was really hyped for Payday 3. You know, I put a ton of time into Payday 2, and I was really looking for something like an evolution of the payday formula, and unfortunately, I'm here to come and tell everyone that. I just don't think this game has it, at least not at this moment.
Now don't get it, twisted payday 3 is still a good game; however, when you compare payday 1, 2, and 3. In my opinion, payday 3 is the weakest, and I'd rather play payday 1 and 2, but payday 3 does have plenty of good qualities to it now. When it comes to the setup of this game, it takes place after payday 2, and it shows all the money the payday gang got stolen from them, so you know they got to get their bread back and they got to make some money.
It's just really the original four and two new characters, and yeah. Bane unfortunately has also been just massacred so we got a new person in charge and yeah they're just here to make some money the setup is fine Bane not being there was a little weird at first especially you know after so much time in Payday 1 and two but I got adjusted to the new character I thought she was fine but that's the premise let's talk about the elephant in the room the always online, nonsense that payday 3 is just honestly plagued by and lowkey ruined by, this game had a very poor launch one of the worst launches I've ever seen for a article game I tried to play this game on launch with my friends as did many other people and we just couldn't ever get into a game 2 3 hours we waited before we finally gave up and said we can't ever get into a game we're just sitting on the menu, matchmaking.
Like we're trying to do a private game, there are four of us. We don't need to match; there's no random coming in. Why can't we just play the game? we tried all weekend we could not get into a single game all of launch weekend it was just totally broken and I went you know what let me just try to play by myself you know what I'll play offline single player it should be fine no you have to matchmake for a single player game I wanted to play a heist by myself no you have to matchmake, and that wasn't even working either so I just couldn't play the game at all and here we are a couple weeks later and we still have trouble getting into games we still wait 5 10 minutes sometimes 15 minutes just to get a game going because it just says matchmaking, shoot I even just waited like 10 minutes to play a single player game like a week ago like are you kidding me what is this nons sense.
I don't know if this was a deep silver call, an Overkill call, or always online [__] but whatever this is, it needs to be taken out of the game immediately. This is probably the biggest thing holding payday 3 back. I wouldn't be surprised if they spent the next 6 to 12 months just trying to repair the game's reputation.
Hey, it works. You can get into games. You can actually play the games. This is just a joke. This is just terrible, but I don't want to spend the whole article complaining about that. Just get rid of it when you actually do get to play the game. The game isn't all that different from Payday 2. You know, you get into your heist; they're all one-day heists.
Now i might add that up to four players cooperate, and you're usually given the task of collecting or stealing something and getting it back to the truck or, you know, the helicopter. There's a bunch of cops you'll kill along the way. There's different variants of the police, ranging from shitty mall cops to people with tasers to Sam Fisher from Splinter Cell and even bulldozers that can just wreck your [ __ Along the way, you can be stealthy in most of these heists, and all of them do provide something different.
At the very least, the game is pretty solid when it comes to its shooting. I'd say the shooting in this game might arguably be the best of the three payday games. It feels nice, and all of the weapons behave decently. From what I've played, most of the weapons do actually feel different from each other, which is nice because in Payday 2, a lot of the weapons did feel the same, but there were also like over 100 weapons in that game.
Depending on how you cleared the highest, did you do just the bare minimum, or did you actually collect some extra money? Depending on your difficulty, you'll be rewarded with XP and money when it comes to the heist themselves. I'm kind of mixed on them in this game. Look, I don't think any of the heists are necessarily bad here, but I'll be just 100.
I like the heist of Payday 2 way more than this game shoot. I kind of like the heist of Payday 1 a little bit more than this game. First off, like I mentioned, there's only one day. The two, three, and 5-day heists of Payday 2 are gone. A lot of the risk-versus-reward elements from Payday 2, I feel, are also gone.
