Ten years have swooped by since Payday 2 convinced us to don our goofy masks, take up arms and rob banks of all their swag and cash with buddies over an online connection. Now a decade later, the franchise returns for a third entry stuffed to the gills with more high stakes heists than a certain Steven Soderbergh directed film series, but does Payday 3 steal more than money in its bid to keep those multiplayer servers ticking along, or does it steal your precious time as well?
Welp, Payday 3 accomplishes the stealing of your time right out of the gate, that didn’t take long now did it? When you Boot up Payday 3, you’re met with a hype-zapping message to create a Starbreeze Nebula account before you start playing. If there’s one surefire way to drop you out of a heist before it’s even begun, it’s by signing up to an online membership. Even worse still, your Nebula account may fail, forcing you to scramble for a fix that could take many minutes or hours of desperate frustration. Playing any modern videogame that wastes your time by mandating sign-ups to their servers is, quite frankly, cramming the urine-stained biscuit right into your pie-hole and expecting you to chew and swallow it.
When you’re afforded the chance to play Payday 3, what you get is largely what you’d expect if you’ve played the previous entries. There are multiple levels situated in various locations and scenarios, where you’re tasked with completing a set number of objectives. Typical bank heists prompt you to keep hostages at bay by sticking them up and preventing them from escaping or finding help, opening locked doors, securing areas, surviving waves of armed police, then getting out of dodge, provided you’ve evaded the hailing bullets from a swarm of grizzled swat forces.
The action usually starts off slow and methodical, where you and your crew contend with the bog-standard preamble of attempting to break locks or corral hostages to prevent them from running away to call the fuzz, and lockpicking doors. Before long, proceedings quickly escalate when alarm bells are raised, police crash through glass panes ready to eliminate you and quell the riotous fracas, and you find yourself entrenched in intense stand-offs against relentless waves of armed police surging towards you.
The thrill of robbing banks is exhilarating at first, where running continually on-foot, rushing to retrieve a huge loot bag of cash, then frantically dashing to the getaway convoy to escape are par for the course. There’s an adrenaline rush to Payday that is unlike other multiplayer shooters on the market, and Payday 3 retains this rush to a considerable degree, even though the routine activities inherent in heists is comparable to running on a treadmill at a fast and consistent pace, you can keep running and running, but eventually the gas tank depletes and you end up craving more variety.
Unfortunately, the familiarity and the lack of evolution from its predecessor Payday 2 starts to become all-too evident in Payday 3, so unless you happen to be a devoted die-hard Payday fan, or a fresh-faced newbie, Payday 3 will feel disappointingly hollow and bereft of new ideas. Worse still, whereas Payday 2 was packed with content that kept players invested and coming back for more, Payday 3 appears incapable of filling its boots; instead of expanding the arsenal of its predecessor, it provides fewer weapons and a dearth of features, failing to qualify this third game as a proper sequel. Consequentially, Payday 3 ought to be dubbed as “Downgrade Edition” rather than a whole sequel, thanks to the lightweight piecemeal offering presented here.
Thankfully the fundamentals of Payday remain largely intact, which if anything else, will keep you snatching the spondoolies, packing it all in gym bags and taking off like 4 chaos-causing western gunslingers. Speaking of guns, the gunplay in Payday 3 is snappy and satisfying, granting a fast-pumping level of feedback with each weapon, equalling the tempo and frantic nature of the heists themselves. Afterall, robbers need a reliable arsenal that’s effective at keeping the pigs at bay, so it’s thankful Payday 3 affords you the firearms you need to get jobs done in a pinch, leaving no room for jams or lengthy reloads-because when your back is against a wall made of barbed wire and gorily vivisected swat team members with pieces of wire jutting out of their torsos- you gotta bring out the heavy artillery like those giant grenade launchers that can level parades of police with one satisfying blast. You can buy a huge cavalcade of weapons from the in-game store, the cash of which you obtain through all the swag you pilfer from every heist. So yes, ensure you hurl as many sports bags onto the helicopter as possible so your payout can become sumptuously sizable, the spoils are worth the effort of fending off the relentless hordes of armed police anyway.
Mission diversity is commendable in Payday 3, giving you a myriad of locations for which you can swipe the dirt from filthy rich Uncle Sam. You start off by casing a bank, but before long you’ll be defending a convoy as it makes its way across a bridge, stealing cash from a bustling nightclub, robbing a jewellery store, an art gallery and a mogul’s penthouse- there’s a solid amount of flexibility on offer, although there are only 8 heists overall, at least each of them are quite different in terms of location and ambience.
The level designs of these heists are meticulous, usually stuffed with unsuspecting innocent people and a peaceful environment at first until you trigger the alarms and all manner of chaos ensues. Depending on whether you want to go in all guns blazing or take the methodical stealthy approach, Payday 3 does its best to cater to both methods of heisting, but realistically your work is cut out for you if you want to take the stealthy approach. There are so many security cameras, suspicious bouncers and general ways to trip the alarm systems that choosing the cerebral approach commonly backfires and you’re left with no choice but to don your mask, take up arms, and fight your way through the hordes.
Besides battling bog-standard bobbies, there are a range of other enemy types in Payday 3 you need to be keenly aware of. Squaddies armed with shields will prove a nuisance to you, forcing you to find and pop off their back to neutralize them, snipers will perch on rooftops and attempt to pick you off, sabotage squads invade the scene attempting to make your objectives tougher to complete, dozers are your typical giant-sized bullet-sponges who pack intense firepower and endurance, Naders will throw green gas grenades to stink up the place to choke you out, and Cloakers are like ninjas with their out-of-nowhere pounce attacks who specialize in wiping out the lonely and the isolated.
Out of all the enemy types you’ll come up against, only the Naders are new to Payday3, which further promotes the idea that Payday 3 is a lesser experience than its predecessor. Still, there’s a good assortment of threats to keep your eyes peeled for, just be sure to stay with your pals, so you can fight off any scourge that gets in your way.
Nestled within Payday 3 is a story that takes place after Payday 2 and includes brief cutscenes regarding each job you’re about to undertake. There’s no great legendary yarn here about bank robbers having a heart, a soul and a family to take care of, it merely provides context to the jobs at hand.
Payday 3 won’t wow you with its technical or graphical chops, but it’s a serviceable looking game by any standard. Multiplayer performance is smooth and you can rest assured that most of the multiplayer games you dive into are going to be hassle-free. Sometimes your buddies may stand around taking smoke breaks before commencing with the heists, but otherwise getting down to brass tax is straightforward.
Conclusion
After a decade away, it’s disappointing that Payday 3 feels so insubstantial and unwilling to evolve from its excellent predecessor. The heist variety and enemy types are cool, but the predictably rote objective-following and the continuing practise of shooting bullets into police is tiresome and without change-ups to make them entertaining. For seasoned veterans and newcomers, Payday 3 should grant you a worthwhile exhibition of heists across a smorgasbord of locations, but for everybody else, this’ll be an eye-rolling exercise of the familiar and the banal. If you can band together with three mates then there’s some valuable loot to steal here, but what maybe most apparent is how Payday 3 ironically steals your time without the valuable substance to go along with it.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
