Payday 3 Is A Rough Diamond
This is obviously crucial, as being damaged in Payday 3 is a much bigger deal than it ever was in two armors, has a very limited temporary damage regeneration, and your health bar always feels non-existent once those plates are broken. Means you need to be much more aware of how you're choosing to tackle gun fights even on Lower difficulties special enemies have also had a lot more thought but into how they vary up the gameplay with me actually finding that my playstyle is specifically strong against certain enemy types and weaker against others as someone who loves going off on solo Adventures I have been punished repeatedly by the now much more acrobatic, cloaker a unit which in my opinion is balanced to perfection in this game but I find my match up into the new Grenadier enemy used to be quite favorable as I often try to keep sieves around neutering, their gas grenades and because their utility is generally targeted at teams that lay to group up and hold down positions with area denial as such I feel genuinely specialized, at all times due to my high Style Just via the gameplay Loop without needing to really role play with my skill build dozers.
They are also wondrously overpowered, forcing teams to focus far on one target and often single-handedly breaking the back of a squad, while Shield AI is probably the biggest standout, doing so much to protect their teammates and often cornering gang members if they don't stay on the move only. The taser has felt fairly low impact to me so far, and that's probably due to how much of a liability he is with that easy-to-hit weak spot on his belt, but even so.
I think Payday 3 Special Units are a resounding success so far and can't wait to see future developments. As far as map design is concerned, I'd say for the most part it's much tighter than what we had in Payday 2, which leads to more tailed experiences than the very freeform traversal. The old map sizes have shrunk relative to the later Payday 2 Heist, which has led to a consolidation of a lot of the best paydays a franchise has to offer.
When you take on a heist, you'll simply feel involved from minute one onward and will be constantly scanning the environment for things to help with the heist. I've only really talked about loud gameplay so far, which is a crime when stealth is the mode that's had the biggest glow-up stealth.
Positives
It's odd to see some backwards steps being taken here, but I'm not panicking just yet. We don't even have a launch day patch, so it's a bit hasty to be talking about missing features, but I would still say it's worth mentioning and putting these things on Starbury's radar. Of course i should also touch on the technical issues, some of which are of their own making, with always online putting on juice stress on servers, which I have admittedly found to be okay.
The elephant in the room is just eight feet high. Ever since I got to play the full game early, I've had my fears regarding this one. Even though the heists are all top quality and have solid replayability. I'd argue they lack some of the randomization from Payday 2, meaning after you cleared them a few times in both loud and stealth, you will have seen a lot of what the game has to offer, and you can do exactly that in about 10 to 15 hours.
The question becomes: are the gameplay loop regression systems good enough to keep you going regardless? But that actually says for me they are, but for others, Eight Heist will undoubtedly disappoint and feel a little lackluster. At launch, what I would say is that Payday 2 launched with less content and still went on to be a success of mind-blowing proportions, so with the groundwork Payday 3 has already laid.
Conclusion
I'm expecting a very similar story once again. All said, I'm still having a blast with the game, and we'll be streaming it whenever my internet connection allows. I want to congratulate the developers for creating a game that, for all intents and purposes, is my dream payday 3.
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