Review: Payday: The Heist
By Dustin Mendel | November 1, 2011 | Reviews | No comments | Share
When Sony announced their PSN Play program earlier this summer, the game that stood out the most for me, more than Street Fighter III or a new Deathspank game, was Payday: The Heist. I’ve always been a fan of heist movies like Heat, and the prospect of donning a creepy mask and robbing banks with a crew of my own sounded fantastic, and unlike anything found on the Playstation 3. Based on the footage released in anticipation of its release, my expectations for the gritty, intense shooter were pretty high, so it may not be fair to say that it failed to live up to them. There are things about Payday that fell disappointingly short, but in the heat of a heist, with three human partners communicating with you, the game can be a blast.
Gameplay
The goal in Payday is about as complicated as you’d imagine a heist game would be; players choose between four different characters, and take on six different job opportunities, amassing a fortune and levelling up as you go. The game doesn’t bother with any semblance with a story, and each mission is explained with a handful of text and a quick exchange of dialogue before throwing you into the action. The playable characters are ridiculously cool in their Dark Knight-meets-Twisted Metal style masks, which made the lack of presentation seem like a missed opportunity, especially when playing the game with three NPCs. Had each of the six heists started with a quick cutscene, it would’ve made all the difference in the world when tackling the game from a single player perspective, although it’s pretty clear that this isn’t how the game is meant to be played.
The game is pretty unapologetic about the level of violence.
The real heart of Payday is gathering three other people, preferably with mics, and plugging through each campaign, adjusting methods and tactics as you learn and improve your equipment. The game doesn’t try to blow you away with any one aspect of its gameplay, but rather provides a stage for players to team up and do cool stuff together, and like I said, when it all comes together, it can be a lot of fun.
Do You Have Any Idea Who You’re Stealing From?!
I was initially worried when I heard when I heard that the game would only feature six campaigns, but my fears were quickly put at ease, for several reasons. Payday’s heists are broken up into a series of objectives, which, while similar from mission to mission, are presented in ways that are different enough that each heist feels unique. In addition to robbing banks, players will be freeing prisoners from a massive police convoy, stealing diamonds from a high security sky scraper and even stealing a panic room from a drug lord’s hideout, with the help from a helicopter and a giant magnet. Sure, each heist mainly consists of blowing away cops and fetching items, but they each have a distinct feel, particularly in terms of map design.
The other way the developers have managed to extend replayability is by a surprisingly deep levelling system. As you play through the heists, by collecting money and completing challenges, like getting a certain number of kills with a gun or trading hostages for members of your team, you will move up through almost 150 different levels, each one unlocking new guns, perks and abilities. Your skills are broken up into three different skill trees, and you’ll need to play each heist with significantly different approaches if you want to improve each tree.
The Ugly Side of Robbing Banks
There’s no question that Payday gives you a reason to keep coming back, but after playing through each heist a number of times, I couldn’t help but think that the heists themselves could have been made more exciting. Each heist is broken up into a series of objectives which must be completed while holding off waves of cops. The objectives themselves were pretty original, like using thermite to burn through an office floor or setting a fire to smoke out a member of your crew who has betrayed you. In essence though, these objectives require holding one of the shoulder buttons on the controller, and then simply waiting out a clock. Upon first hearing about the game, the level that seemed to be inspired by the getaway scene in Heat interested me the most, but the level just didn’t have the same level of intensity found in the movie. In one playthrough, most of the level was spent scrounging for ammo, quietly completing objectives while my partners held off the police or looking for a hostage, who had been left behind near the beginning of the level.
OK I have the hostages...what do I do with them?
It seems fair to say that Overkill Software took inspiration from the Left 4 Dead games when designing how the missions would work, but L4D has the benefit of a variety of different zombie types at its disposal to mix things up, while Payday can only throw cops wearing different outfits into the action. The game seems to make up for the monotony of your assailants by ramping up the difficulty, often in unfair ways. On levels like the Green Bridge mission, cops seem to appear out of nowhere, surrounding you in seconds, and they can snipe you from hundreds of feet away, almost entirely from behind cover. Don’t expect to blow through the last two heists on Overkill difficulty, even if you’re the most seasoned shooter veteran.
The other surprising misstep is the complete lack of instructions or help in every facet of the game. Things like the game’s skill trees are never explained, and while most of the objectives are straightforward, if you happen to miss something that your teammate shouts at you, you’ll be completely on your own in terms of getting back on track and figuring out the next objective. The game doesn’t feature any kind of radar, which would have been invaluable, instead using glowing silhouettes that the player can see through walls, providing you’re close enough to whatever you’re trying to see. As I mentioned, on the Heat-inspired heist, our I mistakenly thought that our hostage had followed our commands to keep moving, and it was only after ten minutes of fighting off waves of police, completely emptying both of my guns of ammo, that I realized that I would have to run back through most of the level to find him and order him to keep going.
Several of these problems are solved after playing through the heists multiple times, where players know in advance what will be expected and can plan out a strategy, but that ruins the illusion of playing as a bank robber for me. The missions are presented as being expertly planned out by your team, so spending your first few playthroughs of a heist wandering around a map looking for a flight of stairs is incredibly frustrating, and it could have been easily avoided.
If you do hang in there and assemble a regular team of friends, you’re going to have a great time mastering the game’s heists. It’s simply a matter of overcoming the game’s steep learning curve and communicating effectively (the PS3 community seems to be allergic to using mics, so keep that in mind). None of the game’s shortcomings were enough to ruin my fun while robbing banks and blowing away SWAT members, but I couldn’t help but wonder what this game would have been like if the game had received the same level of polish as other major Sony releases.
Score: 7.5/10 | Read our Scoring Policy |
