Oh boy. It’s been over ten years since the launch of Payday 2, and as time went by, so many changes were made to that game, that it’s hard to remember just what it was like when it launched. By now we can forgive past mistakes made by Overkill/Starbreeze. They added and then removed micro-transactions (something they promised not to do) after an outcry from the community, left console players behind by not updating the game, and even within this past year when putting Payday 2 on the Epic Games store, effectively breaking the game for people on Steam, I have stood by Starbreeze, and still mostly enjoyed my hundreds of hours spent in their second instalment of the franchise. This launch might be the reason I don’t do that anymore.

Payday 3 was barely playable for the first three to four days of its release. Before the game’s launch, in response to the controversial announcement of the game always needing to be online to play, Almir from Starbreeze was asked what would happen if the servers went down. He replied that they wouldn’t. Now obviously this aged hilariously but what’s not so funny is the sad reality of how exactly this even happened. Not only were there closed betas, one of which was a stress test to push the servers to their limits, but the controversial and unanimously unliked decision to only have game work online was a huge contributing factor. If solo players, who do in fact exist, wanted to play offline then the server load would have been significantly lessened. The response on Twitter was a joke too, indicating that the issues were getting better only to tweet a moment later that they actually hadn’t. It’s all too common for games to have crap launches in this modern era, but when you can see steps being taken, and also not taken to prevent it, it just makes you wonder what the hell they were thinking. I don’t want to focus too much on the launch, because eventually, it won’t matter, but it’s definitely something that was a pain in the ass and caused the game to be review-bombed to hell on Steam.

Plot-wise, 3 takes place after 2, obviously, and all you need to know is that the gang is back. Dallas, Wolf, Chains and Hoxton, along with old Switch exclusive Joy, and newcomer Pearl are “doing the heists” and whatnot. After retiring, unretiring, and then blowing up an oil rig at the end of the last game, The Payday Crew find themselves based in New York, and take most assignments through Shade, occasionally being a middleman to old favourites like Vlad, The Butcher, more recent additions like Shayu, and new contractors like the one played by Ice-T. There is a loose, and pretty dull storyline connecting all the heists which I won’t lie, feels pretty soulless, especially in comparison to what Payday 2 eventually became. Not just thanks to the addition of Locke making heists five times more fun to play through, but there were honestly some great moments tied to the storyline in Payday 2.  Bain being kidnapped, betrayals from the likes of Hector and The Dentist, and the absolute wackiness that led to the true ending, all shaped the current state of the Payday universe. So in comparison, this much more grounded and toned-down restart just seems so… meh.

I’ve been pretty harsh so far, so to focus on a positive aspect of this game, the actual in-heist gameplay can feel really good. Yes, there’s still a great deal of downtime and bag hauling, but the familiar aspects of the past two games that work well, continue to work well here, at least to some degree. Special cops like Tasers (now Zappers) and Cloakers have been redesigned for the better, with the latter no longer downing you instantly. New mechanics like Rush, Grit and Edge, providing boosts to speed, damage output and damage resistance respectively, are what the new skill system is based around, and offer a new way to experience Payday, while not striving too far from what made the last two, specifically the second game, a fun time. I will say that however, and thanks to a lot of other factors that I will be getting into, the heists don’t feel nearly as replayable, which was a huge drawing point before. I was hoping this would be a game I could sink hundreds of hours into like with Payday 2, but at launch, I’d be hard-pressed to warrant a reason to go back to it until more content is added, most likely being in the form of paid DLC…

A long-standing gameplay mechanic and recurring joke amongst the community is that Payday 2 had too much waiting around for the drill to do its thing, and to fix it whenever it breaks. I didn’t mind that too much, but I can see how the monotonous nature of the task could annoy players. While drills are still present in Payday 3, albeit in fewer numbers, their spiritual successor might actually be worse. In what I can only assume was an attempt to stop overusing the drill, a new “hacking” element forces players to instead, locate circles on the floor and stand in them until the hack is done. Now this on its own is fine-ish, it often feels a bit dumb and grinds the gameplay to a halt unless you’re actively defending the point from waves of oncoming cops, but what’s more dumb is how it’s a main objective of (what feels like) every single heist. By the time you’ve done all the heists at launch, you will never want to see a circle again. It gets worse though, as this isn’t even exclusive to the loud, guns-blazing gameplay, but also stealth, where I suppose the threat of someone seeing you in said circle is a bit more intense.

While we’re on the subject of stealth gameplay, I’m torn about my overall feelings on it. Stealth was definitely my preferred playstyle in Payday 2, and I would still happily go back and play heists like Shadow Raid over and over again as I have over the past ten years. So when I saw the new stealth mechanics including fingerprint reading, secure areas, and maskless heisting, I was understandably excited. The stealth can be fun in this game, but quite a few issues are holding it back. Firstly you can’t preplan anymore (which wasn’t initially in Payday 2 so I’ll give it a slight pass) meaning heists are a lot more linear. Adding to that is the very strange decision regarding the random elements of each heist. If you fail a heist and restart it in the same lobby, the codes, keycard locations and other RNG elements will be the same, meaning you can somewhat cheese the system on repeated attempts. I genuinely can’t tell if that’s a mistake or not, but it exists. The main issue I have however is also applicable to the rest of the game, and it’s how the game punishes you for playing solo. Trying to do stealth on your own is considerably harder than going in with friends, and it’ll take you around an hour to do some heists solo on the hardest difficulty. This was a much more infrequent occurrence in Payday 2, largely in part due to that game being a lot faster-paced, something I feel reminded of a lot when playing this game. Solo was sometimes a more reliable option for stealth in Payday 2, as you’d have full control over what you were doing, but now being at the mercy of a system that was built solely around co-op play, I often feel the opposite.

I’ll elaborate further on how much of a downgrade the solo experience is here compared to Payday 2. Not only is the game always online, which is a massive fuck you to anyone who primarily plays alone, but is also one of the major examples of Starbreeze purposefully leaving the solo-based gameplay behind. Another is that difficulty levels now are defined by “this difficulty would be best for 4 players”, which is unbelievably shit, considering how difficulty shouldn’t be a test of how many people you have, but the level of challenge you want to experience whilst playing, regardless of player-count. A phenomenal inclusion that was presented in the previous game was how you could gain perks for you and your AI team, that increase with each additional bot in your heist, offering enhancements for those playing alone. This addition improved the enjoyability and validity of going at it alone on even the highest difficulties, so the lack of it here feels like either a massive oversight or a deliberate exclusion of solo players.

Lacking the aforementioned skills, however, is not the worst part about playing with AI/Bot teammates. My good friend and heisting partner Klemen, described the bots in this game as “lobotomised” and I can’t really argue with that takeaway. Not only do they seem to go down every other minute, but they can’t revive other bots, only actual players, which even then they sometimes can’t seem to do. I became incredibly excited at the idea that they place down ammo bags and health kits when an assault is finished but would gladly trade that back to regain the ability to command them fully. In the prior game, you could make them hold a position, however in this game, just getting them to follow you is like talking to a brick wall. I’m not saying the AI in Payday 2 was perfect, but it was a damn sight better than this

The heists themselves are pretty decent, and hey that’s a positive note so I’ll focus on that. The eight offered at launch are a nice spread of classic heisting locations. As such you’ve got two banks, a jewellery store, an art gallery, a shipping yard, a penthouse, and a convoy mission not dissimilar to Green Bridge or Heat Street from Payday: The Heist. While these Heists aren’t nearly as ambitious as say, an EDM concert or The White House (both featured in Payday 2), they demonstrate how the new engine and modern changes make simpler heists feel and look a lot more ambitious. While the comparisons between the bank heists that Payday 2 launched with, make this game look a lot more advanced, the heisting options at launch for 2 could arguably be considered a wider range. While shorter heists like Mallcrasher and Four Stores made for great smash and grabs, it’s the Three-Day Heists that seal the deal for me. I don’t miss the escape feature, but a few multiple-day heists definitely could have made Payday 3’s selection feel that much more diverse.

Right. I’ve been insanely critical of almost all aspects of this game, but there is one element, so crucial to the success of this game and yet so remarkably fumbled, that it genuinely baffles me as to why it was included at all. Worse than always online, the buggy AI, and the horrible servers, is the progression system used for this game. While at first, I thought the idea of XP from completing challenges was a neat alternative to simple XP based on Heist completion and how much loot you’ve collected, I now see how anti-replayable it makes the game. I’ll say that I don’t mind individual weapon levelling, even though it doesn’t seem to actually award the XP gained in a heist half the time, but the idea of only gaining levels by completing certain challenges makes it so you might not be inclined to take all of the loot, or play a specific heist again, or even, for me, boot up the game at all. There was a reason that people still enjoyed playing a two-hour Cook Off lobby in Payday 2, and that’s because the longer you stay and the more loot you acquire, the greater the reward. In this game, however, after completing a difficult heist, and not gaining any weapon levels, no XP and only getting fairly meaningless money, I become so unbelievably demotivated to play the game at all. This is crazy to follow up from a game like Payday 2, which most years I sink another hundred hours into, despite having completed the heists multiple times.

What makes this challenge-based progression system even worse is that the menu to navigate which challenges you’ve completed and have yet to do is disgustingly laid out. You can’t search by heist, the challenges you may have completed often don’t register that they’re done, and therefore don’t award the appropriate XP, while some of the challenges themselves are to play a heist a certain number of times, to a ridiculously tedious figure. I don’t know why certain challenges that I could complete are locked, or why the layout of said challenges is so unbearably painful to navigate, but what’s more questionable is how this idea made it past the suggestion phase. Imagine playing a game that instead of rewarding you for each mission, tells you you’ll get a reward if you complete it another nine times. Disgusting.

I said in my Beta impressions that I was more focused on what the game could become over its lifespan rather than the product in front of me, however now that the game has launched, that feels more like an excuse. Just because Payday 2 got gradually better over time doesn’t mean that this game should launch in such a disappointing way. A sequel shouldn’t feel like a step back in almost every aspect other than graphics and bloody lockpicking. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of these decisions are reversed in the future, or at least I hope they’ll be adjusted, and at the very least fixed when they straight up don’t work.

I really, really wanted to like this game. I gave it a chance after the horrific launch didn’t let me play for multiple days (thank god Lies of P was out), and even defended the somewhat questionable ideas. It’s just that the more I play it, the more monotonous it feels. If I’m gonna be standing in these hacking circles so many times, I at least want to be rewarded accordingly for doing so. If I’m gonna play solo, I don’t want to feel hindered because of how unreliable the AI is. And if I want to play Payday when this game has only just come out, I don’t want to feel like booting up Payday 2 instead.