Game Payday: The Heist
Developer Overkill
Publisher Sony
Platform(s) PS3, PC
Review Score 7.0
It’s Payday, but Overkill Software may have docked your check a bit…
Payday: The Heist is a shooter that combines 4-player cooperative gameplay with heist-themed objectives and challenges. You can play as one of four masked gunmen alongside AI or team up with real people online as you work to improve your performance across the six different missions. The first of these missions is a bank job, and with the fact that you and your team are these guys with suits and masks, you instantly think “Point Break”, which is never a bad thing.
The cooperative gameplay is a similar to Left 4 Dead, and will look very familiar the moment you pop into your first job. Your teammates will be outlined in green when obstacles obscure your direct line-of-sight with them, and key objective items such as gas tanks will have an orange outline that behave in the same way. The controls feel similar and elements of the HUD have a L4D-ish quality about them; there’s even a trophy called “Left for Dead” to top off the game’s obvious source of inspiration.
The finer aspects of the game, such as the tree leveling system, are never explained and left to the player to sort it all out for themselves. This approach may potentially cause some people to give up on the game fairly quickly. As someone who enjoys the setup and planning just as much as the actual execution of a job in heist moves, I was a little disheartened with the lack of this stage in the game, which I believe could have served as the perfect and much-needed tutorial mission to get the player going.
There are civilians that you can hogtie to take as hostages, but this does not stop the police from fully unloading on you anyway as you might expect. They are not without their uses though, as they can be used as bargaining chips to take back a teammate that had been apprehended.
Like Left 4 Dead, Payday is definitely a game you will want to play with live players rather than the AI; the AI is basically useless when it comes to completing objectives. After pulling off the First World Bank heist, you are betrayed by one of the non-main guys which leads you to having to catch up with him. Upon reaching him, you must lead him to a pickup point, but there’s nothing informing the player how to do this, there is only a brief on-screen bit of info telling you to force him to move. Initially I thought I might have to tie him up in the same way as when taking civilians hostage, but I did not see an R2 prompt as with civilians so I instead tried shooting at him and using the melee attack on him, but nothing worked. I decided to head to the pickup zone anyway and hoped that maybe one of my teammates might grab him, but of course they did not. Eventually I discovered that I could use R2 to shout at him and get him moving, but there was nothing indicating this. That’s one of my major concerns with this game, a lot of the on-screen stuff that would be beneficial to the player is absent from the game. If there’s an objective that requires some wait time, no timer exists to see the progress and is instead indicated by one of the characters shouting out “Alright 30 seconds, guys”, but there are no subtitles and this voice over can be easily missed among the fray of everything else.
All in all, Payday: The Heist might do well to serve as a moderately fun distraction over an afternoon or two with some friends, but only if you got it for free from buying the other games in PlayStation’s Play program. Once you figure out what you’re doing, it can be fun to play through the missions once or twice, but unless you really care about marginally improving your performance, it quickly loses its appeal. If you did not already get it for free from the Play program, I would recommend saving your 20 bucks for one of the many AAA titles releasing this holiday season.
