Payday 3 Review
From the city street shootouts of heat to the creepy clown masks found in the Dark Knight's opening moments, there's something alarmingly alluring about the Hollywood bank heist fantasy. Fortunately, the excellent payday series has been letting me live it out for myself for more than a decade without needing to establish a rap sheet.
The next chapter in this long-running burglary simulator. Payday, has finally been released from custody, and though it continues the series's tradition of delivering one of the best digital Smash and Grab experiences out there, the usual horrible payday bugs, a dinky pool of jobs to tackle, and a predictably weak story mean it's not exactly the giant leap forward I was hoping for.
We need more information to get to the bottom of this conspiracy, but if Payday 2's post-launch support is any indication, this is at least a very promising start for what could become another decade of Happily pistol-whipping cashiers and fixing drills. Like its predecessor, Payday 3 is a cooperative multiplayer FPS where you and three friends take on increasingly elaborate heists.
The extremely thin story focuses on the same Motley Crew of criminals as they're forced out of retirement by a secretive cabal of shadowy and generic Silhouettes. I still have a few more cards up my sleeve, but we need cash to keep on pushing. Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the story itself is just a sequence of slides with voiceover justifying the string of jobs you'll undertake, with precious little to tie them together.
I'm just glad it's over. Things started to go crazy, as if this mission where you work with iced tea needed any justification. But even if the story never really takes off, it does do a good job of setting the stage while hinting at what the future might bring. I say we find something worth stealing, but then we steal it.
Yeah, within seconds of beginning my first robbery at the obligatory local bank branch intro level, the movement and gunplay already felt enormously upgraded relative to Payday 2. You move faster overall and could play a more modern action game. Maneuvers like sliding, which I found useful in combat as well as for stealth, make weapons feel punchier and more satisfying even if they are burdened with hopelessly small magazines and long reload times.
Before you've spent some of your ill-gotten in-game cash on upgrades, you can even use civilian hostages as meat shields, now forcing your law-abiding enemies to engage you in melee to avoid hurting an innocent soul, which is a nice touch. After years of incrementally upgrading seats to PD2 and PD3, it immediately feels like a proper sequel in the gameplay department.
Even if the formula of breaking into vaults and throwing bags of cash into an unmarked van remains identical. A3 also raises the bar with the quality of its misadventures and the fact that the vast majority of the eight available jobs are super well designed. Many feel like instant classics like this Art Museum's delicate puzzles and Labyrinthic Halls hiding priceless art to be pilfered or this fantastic bank heist that throws you into the most elaborate old-fashioned vault break-in, yet the developers at Star Breeze have definitely upped their game in terms of variety and quality with these base stages, and I found myself immediately repeating a completed job more often than not just to practice my strategies and explore other possible outcomes.
That said, there are still some weaker levels, like this combat-focused mission that has you guiding an armored van over a bridge with very little room for deploying different strategies and no stealth option whatsoever. Thankfully, that was the only one of the eight that was especially weak, and the highs of the good ones far outshine the lows of the less interesting choices.
While almost all of the new heists are great, it is a bit disappointing that there are so few of them after such a long wait, presumably that the library will expand dramatically over time just like the previous entry did. But for this review. I have to talk about what's in front of us at launch, and after just five hours.
I'd already completed all of the available jobs and had begun the endless grind of repeating those same gigs over and over again. There is the fact that repeating these missions is a lot less monotonous thanks to the variety granted by adding stealth options. Because of that, most jobs feel like two separate levels in one, thanks to how differently they play from Run and Gun playthroughs.
In many ways, the changes to Payday stealth mechanics are even more significant than any improvements to movement or combat. Only the most committed and elite players stood a chance of pulling off a totally clean heist on Payday 2. In contrast. Payday 3 provides new mechanics to support theft right away, like the ability to pickpocket security guards to relieve them of their key cards or use environmental objects to lure them away.
That means pulling off a clandestine operation here is almost immediately achievable, even with a randomly selected group of players. Loosely communicating with one another via text chat, that's also largely owing to the clever and fantastic ways its missions are designed, in which stealth runs are now given a completely different route to success.
For example, this level normally requires us to go the humdrum path of using thermite to burn through the top of the bank vault and then dive in from the floor above before making off with the loot, but this series of objectives smartly only triggers as your primary path once someone on your team gets caught.
Before that, your crew can take the much more complex and rewarding route of breaking into various parts of the bank to sabotage electrical systems and deactivate security measures to gain access to the vault without anyone being the wiser, which is essentially an entirely different mission if you can pull it off.
That's rarely easy because guards now investigate suspicious activity and do a whole lot more than shoot you when you're spotted. For example, if you're found in a private but not entirely suspicious area like the back office at a bank versus The Vault instead of immediately trying to kill you, they'll simply escort you to a public area and give you a good tongue lashing, which can be used by cutting players to remove guards from their posts temporarily.
