A wasted opportunity

User Rating: 5 | Payday: The Heist PC
The premise of this game is great.
You get to embark on only six various heist missions and complete different tasks.

You get to play with four of your Co-op friends and there is plenty of teamwork and coordination involved.

However, this game is insanely unbalanced. There is a ton of upgrades for instance, which comprise new guns, less recoil, better accuracy, more damage, better armor, mines, new accessories, cuffs, etc.

However, it takes a really long time to unlock anything significant that will help you in any meaningful way. It is not necessary to complete missions to get experience necessarily, the experience is contingent on how many enemies you kill. You start off with a pistol and an assault rifle and you will end up using those two weapons for the next 2-3 hours at least if you plan on upgrading. The gun shooting itself does not feel real, it is way too arcadish.

Four out of six missions however are extremely hard and overwhelming. The first and the third missions are semi-okay. So if you really want to upgrade your character before you take on other missions, play through these missions first over and over again until you get more upgrades. (that will take at least 6 more hours).

Basically, the other four missions are so hard and tedious, that they suck out all the fun out of the game. If you don't keep moving forward, then the enemies will keep re-spawning, yes that's right, like in Call of Duty games. Their aim is impeccable, their ammo is plentiful and they are not afraid at pushing forward and overrunning your team.

The mini tasks that you need to do like using a drill to unlock gates, doors, safes, etc; well these take at least 3 minutes each, but trust me, these minutes will last for eternity. The drill will constantly get stuck and will need to be restarted. The enemies will surround you and you will constantly run out of ammo. When you try to spring for cover and reload, you would have to stop and reload (extremely annoying). And when your co-op buddy is down, you need to spend around 10-15 seconds to pick them up while getting shot at. And then if you want to carry any other special ability besides ammo bag, you would only make it harder on yourself and your team mates. You pretty much NEED to have that ammo bag if you want to have any chance of making a stand when you are surrounded while waiting for your partners in crime to complete their objectives for you to proceed.

The game basically crosses over the line many times over where the frustrations pile up and it's not fun anymore.

You can also take up to three hostages (for each member of your team, unless you exchange your ammo bag for three cuffs). But you cannot even move these hostages, you basically place them on the ground, tie them up and pray that the cops won't get to them, because if they do, the time for negotiation and your subsequent release from custody gets extended beyond 3 minutes. And let me tell you, once one of your team members gets caught, there is very little chance that the other 3 members will be able to hold out for the entire 3 minutes. So the whole hostage thing is moot, just ignore them, or kill them so they don't get in the way.

Every frustration that I have described so far has to do with normal difficulty. I cannot even imagine what's it like playing on Hard or Overkill.

I honestly have no idea what the devs were thinking with this game. Why throw that many suicidal cops and swat team members? It is so unrealistic. All they do is use smoke occasionally, send in one member with a shield or taser gun. They basically make suicidal attacks like the Japanese in WW2, so you get to mow them down and get shot at the same time. When you get shot at, your screen jerks around, your aim gets messed up and your screen gets red - the typical FPS tricks.

All they had to do was lessen the amount of enemies, make enemies harder to kill, make mini tasks more interesting and add a fluid cover system. However, most of the mini tasks that you need to complete do not have any meaningful cover available, so you basically run around like an idiot and try to kill as many enemies as possible.

The game gets repetitive and tedious pretty fast.

Please move on and save your time which is more important than saving money at this point.