September | 2014 | DailyGilson

Payday 2 is one of those once in a while games. It works very well, ready below to find out more.

Payday 2 Logo

Boring Stuff

Payday 2 is a cooperative first-person shooter video game developed by Overkill Software. The game was released on 13 August 2013 and it is the sequel to Payday: The Heist. In the game, players plan and carry out various heists and robberies by using a combination of teamwork, stealth and firearms. Gameplay has been heavily improved and expanded since its predecessor, with a number of new abilities, as well as a reworked stealth mechanic.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Exciting Stuff

I’m not even going to go into the plot of Payday 2 because there simply isn’t one. The missions are more to be seen as standalone self-contained heists. The currently consist of 1 – 3 day affairs where a single heist may have several levels involved before it’s completed. All the heists can be done in a stealthy manner if you so wish. However doing so is inherently difficult. The game is very clever in that doing the heists stealthily gets you much bigger rewards. In one heist, failure to do it stealthily means you can’t get a bank vault full of gold. So you can either have a shootout with the police, or go quietly and get a lot of money in gold. Totally your choice.
Needless to say, I prefer the loud and explosive approach. Makes it more fun.

Payday 2 is very much a game to play with friends. You really do need a team you can trust to know that if you’re the one being the ninja and stealthing a job, they won’t make a mistake and get you killed. At the same time, you need to know that if you make a mistake they won’t be mad. Something I’ve encountered a lot. Mistakes are often but usually not to serious. It only takes a careless shot or an overzealous guard for the alarm to go up and after that it’s a bloodbath.

The developers listened to the criticism of the first game (seemingly a first for game devs) and fixed the weapons in a big way. Instead of a grand total of about 6 weapons in the first game, there are now around 20 – 30. Each is customisable with silencers, scopes, barrels and all manner of things. This is a huge step up and a massive sigh of relief. It means you can customise loadouts for all types of situations. I have a heavy loadout, light loadout and even a ‘random loadout’ (consisting of weapons I want to test out). There is even variable amounts of armour and nicest of all, customisable masks. You unlock weapon modifications, masks and mask customisations through finishing heists. It’s a nice fair system that keeps everything random and generally keeps the community happy. You get as much stuff as you put in effort wise. If you do nothing, you get nothing.

The one thing I do not like about the game is how it presents heists to you. When you’re looking for a game to join, they pop up on a map and you choose what you want to join. There’s no real order to it but when it’s just joining a existing game it’s fine. However when you are the host of a game looking for the next heist, they just pop up about 3 -4 at a time on the map. Nice idea but it’s so annoying when you have to wait for something you want to do. Nice idea, but I don’t like it.

That’s probably my only gripe about the game and that makes it a good game in my opinion. Go buy it, it’s well worth it. My 64 hours in 2 weeks, proves this.

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Looking back on this review, quite a bit has changed. First and foremost, it’s gone from a heisting simulator to a full blown game with storyline. Numerous new missions revolving around an old character known as ‘Hoxton’ who vanished between the first Payday and this one. The climax of this ongoing story arc is that we get to break him out and get him back as a playable character. It’s unreal how much fans are going insane over this. They literally love the guy even though he’s been gone for the entirety of Payday 2.

As well as story we’ve had new maps, rather regularly. Another new one is due to drop tomorrow, free of charge, for steam users. Excellent news in my opinion because it grows the game. The problem that has been noticed recently is that the new maps are, to be frank, rubbish. One map, is a stealth only map. That kinda goes against the fun of Payday. If it doesn’t go right, fight it out and get what you came for anyway. So a mission where you fail if you go loud is frankly boring.
The other example is a map called ‘Big Bank’ as the name suggests, it’s a huge bank. It’s nice enough but it just feels too hard. The map is too big and too long for the current loadouts meaning that once again, you’re almost required to either leave half the loot or to do it stealthily.

I very much hope tomorrows update does us proud.

The developers have set up a blog that charts how many subscribers their steam page has. This chart runs live and shows targets to aim for such as a new enemy type at a certain amount, new weapons or even the Hoxton Breakout. View the blog here. The funniest thing about this is that it’s working a little bit too well. Half the unlocked things are still not there because the developers can’t create it fast enough. Only yesterday we hit 1,400,000 and thus earned a new enemy type. In another 100,000 Overkill will have to come up with new targets and new things to add.

The game is still well worth buying. Even if you bought all of the paid for DLC too you’d still be looking at a very good game. Forget anything else, this is the game to have!