A Game I bought recently – PAYDAY 2

The birthday parties just weren’t earning them enough money.

Payday 2 is an interesting game, its based around heists and looking familiar to the film Point Break though I’m not sure if it’s supposed to do so. The game has you playing as either Hoxton, Dallas, Wolf or Chains. The main progression through the game is done through unlocking new weapons, armour, masks and progressing through the four different skill trees to help you take down enemies or increase your stealth…

I purchased the game for a less than the price on Steam, and you can read at the bottom of the article on how to do so. I found the missions to be quite fun however there is a very limited number of missions, although occasionally new missions are added. The main problem with this is the fact that whilst there can be some variation when you play the same mission again, ultimately it becomes repetitive doing the same missions over to upgrade your character and earn more money. However how good the experience is tends to depend on who you play with if you play with someone on multiplayer. For me the best experience was playing multiplayer with someone whilst physically being sat next to them. This allowed us to come up with strategies and truly see what situation the other person was in and how we could adapt our plan to have the best outcome for the heist.

Therefore with friends it can lead to in depth planning on what item you should bring with you for example one person could bring a medkit, the other an ammo bag. If you have friends on Steam I would encourage you to agree on purchasing the game first as strangers online tend to not stick to strategies or just do something outright stupid. If you play the game on single player whilst it can be helpful to have Computer controlled assistants, it becomes more of a challenge because they will only cover and revive you not help with the mission objective. Although should a game need to have friends play in order to make it fun? I could play Farming Simulator with friends and it would most likely be fun.

It’s not to say that I had a negative experience playing PAYDAY 2 for example I did have a decent time especially after pulling off a mission by taking extra risk to receive those extra few money bags or that extra necklace from the jewellery store and seeing my hard work pay off in the earning page after the heist. I did encounter a couple of sound glitches in the game although these did not hinder my experience, what did irritate was something that I was just unfortunate with which is after a mission you can choose from three cards of which unlock you different things such as a mask, a material for the mask, a gun attachment and so on. Yet even though I was really far through the game I found lots of other people had already got a significant amount of masks which are a pain to achieve because you need to get a mask, a colour and a material to use. The colour and material which may look terrible on your mask. Therefore I feel that they made the colour and material necessary as a way of stretching the length of an already short game, as they could have easily let you choose any colour from the start.

The stealth in the game can also be too tricky at some points for example at one point I was playing on a level set in a Mall, the guard had no problem with me snooping around the downstairs sections and even looking right at him without him being suspicious of my armour, but then I stepped onto the stairs to go up to the shops upstairs and all of a sudden the guard was alerted as if to say “CRIMINAL!!! I KNOW SO BECAUSE CRIMINALS ARE KNOWN TO USE STAIRS!” which changed the outcome of the mission dramatically by being seen so early on.

In conclusion it should be noted that whilst these problems do exist at least in my case, you should be aware this is a team game and when you have a decent experience it can easily be dictated by the people you play online with. The game is short in length however it has a reasonable amount of playability but I think the game can be justified more by the lower price point of which below tells you how to achieve. It is a flawed game, but it is still a solid game.

7.5/10

*How you can receive PAYDAY 2 for a lower price*

1. Check the Steam Marketplace for people trading PAYDAY 2, most likely they will want Team Fortress 2 keys in return.
2. If the current price of keys is lower than the current Steam price (it most likely will be I think I saved £10)
3. You can then purchase the keys and trade them with someone for PAYDAY 2, however you will have to add them to do so, although I found they were good at telling me the process on how to do the trade.
4. Trade the Keys for the game *Note* Hover over the PAYDAY 2 item before accepting to make sure that its not a Steam Profile Background or anything and that is in fact the game.
5. You now have the game.