Payday 3 comes with a laundry list of decisions that players will have to answer quickly when walking into the next job. Mask off or on? Creep around corners and avoid armed confrontation or bust in guns blazing? Engage in a hostage negotiation to buy some time or power through as quickly as possible? After 10 years and more than 200 updates since the Payday gang infiltrated Washington, DC, and after acquiring a few new associates along the way, the crew is picking up where they left off and heading to the greater New York City metropolitan area for Payday 3 — even crossing the Hudson River for a sting in New Jersey. They may have learned a few more tricks of the trade, but it’s up to the player to utilize them effectively. And, more often than not, going in with the goal of pulling off a job under the radar ends in reluctantly busting out guns. One false move is all it takes to blow it.
As much as I wanted to take advantage of the stealth tactics introduced here, I usually ended up bungling it by taking too long to pick a lock or being caught by a security camera I didn’t spot. Much like a real-world heist (uh, not that I would know), all the minutiae must be carefully accounted for to pull off a job as smooth as a Danny Ocean plan. At least the Payday games haven’t exactly conditioned its players to take a gentle approach to robbery, so when things go south, my team was ready to mow down en`dless waves of NYPD for the biggest take we could manage.
In two heists, I played alongside two other human players, and an AI character was our fourth — though half of the time, the AI’s contributions were useless. In one particularly heinous moment halfway through our second game, the AI literally just stood there in the middle of a high-stakes shootout. Other times, it came through for a downed player with a med kit. But based on the inconsistency, I’d recommend linking up with other people, either locally or online with microphones. As always, good communication is paramount to ensure things go well, and the quick replies won’t really cut it here. Yelling “Shit!” is fun, but it’s not exactly directionally helpful to teammates.
Even so, things mostly did not go smoothly for us, which I chalk up to being dumped into the game with no tutorial or cutscene to get a better sense of the mission. Before both heists — the Capital Bank heist we previously previewed and a new one stealing degradable electronic components in a container shipping yard in Bayonne, New Jersey, commissioned by a character played by Ice T — a ready screen laden with paragraphs of text presented information about the assignment. But, since we were playing on the clock, I skimmed, making our objectives probably more confusing than it needed to be. A regular playthrough will almost certainly not be this overwhelming.
The shipping yard especially proved to be a doozy. It’s less straightforward than the familiar bank heist, as the map was a maze of stacked shipping containers, some that lead to dead ends and others that had unlockable latches that weren’t immediately clear in the middle of a cop siege. Though it makes for frenzied gameplay on the first go, it’s definitely a stroke of realism. Luckily, if we blew the mission too badly, we could vote to restart on the menu screen. That said, blasting your way out of trouble isn’t difficult, save for a sporadic ninja-like super-cop who can deal powerful blows. Otherwise, most of the enemy NPCs are fairly slow and dumb, and the reload speeds usually didn’t turn me into a sitting duck. But if enough of them congregate, it gets harder to escape simply based on the sheer power of numbers.
Payday 3 is full of opportunities to get deep in the weeds. At launch, six playable characters will be available, including stalwarts Dallas, Hoxton, Chains, and Wolf, and later Payday 2 additions Pearl and Joy, though neither of the latter two were options in my preview. But prime examples of these endless wells are the enormous skill tree, weapon and item loadout, customized outfits and masks and skins — which, again, I barely had time to really dig into because of the sheer breadth of options and limited time constraints. Rest assured, an optimal combination for every type of player exists if they’re willing to invest the time (and real-world money for add-ons). Starbreeze has promised another lengthy campaign for Payday 3, at least as long as the last game. With big plans like that for heists across the tri-state area, we’ll be raking in New York City’s boatloads of cash and various paraphernalia for years and years.
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