Recent reviews by Trash

Overall, it feels like a step back which isn’t good for a sequel. I get that Payday 2 has had 10 years of content and QoL changes but it feels like lessons learned have not carried over. Mechanics have been changed or left behind to the detriment of the pace and health of the game.

New perk and weapon levelling systems just boil down to more artificial grind to unlock gameplay options before you can have true agency to have fun. Perk decks and skill trees have been merged into one weird system of skill decks (with increasingly arbitrary activation requirements) that you can mix and match but you have to grind to unlock each individual skill. You now have to grind for weapon xp to earn the ability to buy attachments. Amazing how overhauling the system has resulted in people still stealth-rushing a jewellery store to get the xp and attachments they want in order to go and have fun with the rest of the game just like the early days of Payday 2. Great job.

Reducing armour down to basically CoD’s plate system but with each plate regenerating durability until it breaks feels worse than the previous game’s fast recharging to have quick skirmishes and quickly dive into cover for a few seconds and be ready to go again. Now you have to play slower or be punished by losing some armour for the rest of the heist unless you find a limited resource or use a deployable.

The enemy unit overhauls have all been a positive change to make them more intimidating and require playing around instead of mowing through. Some specials don’t stand out as much as they did before making it harder to spot them out of the pack. Cloakers seem to have lost any distinctive audio to help make you aware of their nearby presence (before they had a distinct constant radio noise) which makes suddenly getting taken down by one occasionally feel cheap and unavoidable. Bulldozers are now a serious threat but, compared to how hard the are to kill, give a bit of ammo and 1 single use first aid kit to replenish a player’s health which seems questionably balanced.

The reworked casing mode and approach to stealth gameplay is a huge improvement. The heists are decent even if the layouts are somewhat uninspired and in some cases rather unintuitive. The lack of preplanning and the insight it gave really hurts the first time experience. Most heists I played in public lobbies for the first time and were just 4 people attempting stealth with no idea where any objectives were on the map until someone finally makes a mistake and go loud where I actually get a decent idea of what I’m supposed to do going forward. Also heists appear to have very few random elements that spiced up the older maps and made them more interesting to replay.

Customisation is bland and uninspiring, same goes for the UI. The music has a mix of good and bad tracks, none really stand out to me and I wouldn’t want to listen to any of them outside the game.

All of these combined leave a game with promising potential but I see no reason to play it in its current state. If the devs follow their own example from Payday 2, the game will improve over time. It will be interesting to see how general opinions change and what issues arise once the server issues are fixed and the honeymoon period ends but in my opinion, after several patches, content drops and QoL updates, this game *might* finally be worth purchasing.