“Shoot people, steal things, get paid.
Payday 2 is the sequel to Payday: The Heist, as the name would imply. The game is a first person shooter that puts you and up to three friends in a variety of situations around Washington DC pulling off various heists in order to make mad dosh. This of course puts you up against an array of law enforcers who want nothing more than to fill you and your buds full of bullets and “arrest” them. To prevent them from doing this, and to get all of the money, the four of you are given a wide variety of gadgets, weapons, and masks that allow you to treat each job differently. If you are like me, you believe that 90% of problems in this game can be solved with a shotgun, and this is a viable, if thoughtless and tactless approach. If you aren’t so fond of getting your ass shot off, there are more stealth based approaches to most missions. Disabling security cameras, silently taking out guards and talking to their supervisors to prevent them for getting suspicious, and just being a sneaky little S.O.B. has many perks, like not alerting every armed law enforcement officer in the city to your operation. Of note is that on some heists if you can manage not to trigger any alarms on the first day of your jobs, the following parts in the job can play out radically different.
Of note are the four different skill trees present in the game. First is the Mastermind branch which is a support class with the ability to, among other things, place a medical box down to allow the team to heal itself during a heist, and buff teammates. Second is Technician, a class for those who enjoy blowing things up and placing stationary Sentry guns to aid you in the many firefights you will find yourself in. Third is the Ghost, which as the name would imply, is a stealth based character. Great at infiltrating, worthwhile asset to the team, and has a jammer that messes with security cameras, radios, and civilians cell phones, since those bastards will call the cops at the first sign of trouble. Finally we have the Enforcer. This is what you take if you want to kill people and do terrible things. The Fightiest class, if you will. As you put more of your skill points into these trees, you unlock items that can help you complete the jobs in different, and most of the time quicker ways, allowing for an even wider variety of ways to complete your jobs.
Many of your jobs have small stories behind them, but the main objective is always making as much money as you can through your criminal activities. Either your ingame bud, Baine, will give you a job to do, or different criminal elements will hire you and your friends to carry out jobs for them. The game offers you a variety of different jobs to pull off to get your pile of cash. Sometimes you’ll be finding yourself doing something as simple as running into a jewelry store, grabbing as much valuables as you can, and booking it the fuck out of there before the cops show up, sometimes you’ll be trying to steal loads of gold bars from inside the vault of a bank, occasionally you’ll find yourself cursing your friends out for being the worst goddamned meth cooks after they blow up the lab where you were supposed to be cooking to make some product to trade for info your beneficiary wants on a rival criminal family, and at least once you’ll be waiting on a rooftop making Metal Gear jokes as one of your friends tries (and fails) to break into a senator’s apartment, steal all of his computers, and tries to locate a vault full of gold while avoiding guards and cameras.
The game is meant to be played with your friends and really does shine when you do. There is something about wading through the chaos of a firefight with the police with your best buds that’s just plain fun. There is an offline mode that allows you to do heists alone or with AI companions, but it loses some of it’s charm without other people. The game allows you to have several AI companions if you don’t have a crew to do jobs with, but they don’t do much other than act as bodyguards. This means all of the lock picking, drill fixing, and bag carrying will be entirely up to you, and this can complicate things at times.
Luckily at this point most of the bugs in the game seem to have been worked out, but occasionally you will find yourself staring at your screen in disbelief as you watch one of your needed packages fall through an object and end up unreachable after all the trouble you went to to get it that far. It should be noted that in my experience, occurrences like these were rare, but they do deserve to be at least mentioned.
Overall it’s a solid, fun game that offers enough ways to complete each heist to ensure that it will keep you and your friends entertained for a good amount of time. I’d give it a 9.0 out of 10.
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