Payday: The Heist Review

I sometimes feel as if there is an unofficial agreement between computer animators to directly compete with one another using similarly-themed films. First there was Antz versus A Bug’s Life, then Finding Nemo versus Shark Tale, then Madagascar versus The Wild, or Megamind versus Despicable Me. The video game industry shares this quirk with the film industry, sometimes releasing two games with just enough similarity between them to make casual players pause for a moment to sort out exactly which one they’re remembering.

Thankfully, in the game market these parallels tend towards friendly high quality competition rather than rip-offs or cash-ins: Monday Night Combat was generally acknowledged as a solid response to Team Fortress 2. Killing Floor is played even by people who simultaneously love Left 4 Dead. There’s even a not-yet-released friendly rivalry forming between Torchlight 2 and Diablo 3. Now we have Payday: The Heist, which can’t help but be compared to the Left 4 Dead series. After all, it’s a four-player co-op with a heavy focus on interdependency and teamwork, and the majority of gameplay is driven by fighting off hordes of NPCs (cops this time, instead of zombies). Sticklers who want to cry ‘copy-cat’ will even notice that these NPCs are divided into ‘normal’ and ‘special’ varieties. However, even with all these similarities, Payday is no rip-off, but rather provides a unique gameplay that makes the game fun and exciting.

The gameplay in Payday is delightfully situation-based: there are six ‘heist’ experiences to choose from, including a bank robbery, a safe-room bust, and a hostage rescue. Each heist is comprised of a series of tasks, generally split between defending a position or traveling from one point to another, but these objectives fit so well into the heist that they feel fresh and enjoyable. For example, as a gamer I’ve had to defend a room from invading NPCs hundreds of times, but I’ve never had to hold off a police force while waiting for my cheating fellow criminal to be burned alive in his own escape van. The premise of Payday is the sort that raises the hackles of those groups that want to outlaw violent video games: you do, after all, play as a murderous thief who is quite willing to gun down our nation’s finest officers if they get in the way of the multi-million take. However, this is such stuff as adventures are made of, and I personally found that this premise kept me on edge and interested during the gameplay.

The scenarios in Payday are excellently designed and presented, and you’ll need a variety of tactics and playing styles for each level you go through. As an example, take the first level you’ll play through: robbing a bank. It’s an iconic scene throughout heist movies, and one that must have been hard to translate into a video game level, but Payday does this masterfully, allowing you to soak up the thrill of a multi-staged, well planned operation. Robbing the bank is no simple matter: you must infiltrate the bank, locate the key card, drill through the security gates, pack up the cash, blast out an escape route, and make your getaway. Each of these steps are overladen with the threat of firefights, of incoming police and SWAT teams, and since the timing of a firefight depends partly on chance, there’s always a thrilling incentive to move fast and be efficient. Less time in the bank means less chance of getting caught and a better likelihood of survival. The other scenarios in Payday are equally engaging, with the only legitimate complaint being that there aren’t enough of them.

Weapon options in Payday are more realistic and subdued than in your average shooter. When you first start the game, you’ll be limited to only one pistol and one assault rifle. I personally found that this was definitely a case of ‘less is more’: when you only have two or three weapons, the decision of when to use each weapon becomes vital. The pistol becomes your main weapon, used for basic gunplay and for picking off stragglers. You’ll need your assault rifle for defending against rushes or pushing defended locations, as well as a fall-back weapon for unforeseen surprises. I’m usually not a fan of unlock systems that make a game easier to play as more is unlocked, but it works like a charm in Payday because the weapons and upgrades unlock at roughly the same rate as the general learning curve of the game: it would be a waste to let you have the best weapons when you are still learning how to use your pistol.

One area that Payday excels at is making the situation of the heist itself be reflected in the challenges of the game. For example, your small clips and long reload times make it worth your while to make your shots count. I can’t tell you how often I was ruined as a beginning player simply by trying to ambush a group of policemen when I only had half a clip in my gun. Even with bullet boxes dropped by downed foes to keep you stocked, you can’t just spray shots everywhere and hope for the best, or you may find yourself pinned down and out of ammo. The threat of friendly fire is also an issue, as killing innocent civilians will ruin your bargaining power and make possible respawns difficult. On the flip side, tying up civilians with plastic cuffs will increase your bargaining power with the police, but leaving those hostages unattended will result in their being freed behind your back. You carry only a few cuff pairs, so deciding when and where to take hostages is a strategic move in itself. All this intense focus on the situation stops Payday from being a simple shoot-em-up. Opposing police men can be legitimately hard to take down. With no grenades (at first) to flush out squads of SWAT, attacking involves flanks, rushes, and ambushes, each requiring coordination with your teammates.

Speaking of teammates, finding them might be a bit tricky, as the servers have been a little short on players when I’ve been on. Lobbies can be automatically assigned and filled if you aren’t picky about teammates.

Playing together with online strangers can be a mixed bag, as those players with more weapons and upgrades unlocked might tend to steal the lead position a little more often. For those pioneers who are trying the game out before roping their online friends in, the coop bots do surprisingly well for performing the basic heists. That is to say, they’ll always stick close to you and do a good job of gunning down cops during firefights. The one deficiency on this point might be that the heists are so focused on team-based multitasking that having two or three bots in the mix might keep you on easy difficulty settings if you want to get the job done.

The entire gaming industry has seen a shift towards cooperative gaming in the last decade, and Payday successfully rides that wave by having tightly knit gameplay mixed with good situational challenges. Rather than simply being another four person coop added to the stack, Payday is the sort of game that might just pull some people away from today’s big industry leaders, and that alone makes it a game worth trying out.