September 27th 2023.
It's been over a decade since the release of Payday 2 and now the much-anticipated sequel, Payday 3, has finally arrived. But is it good enough to win fans' hearts all over again?
Nobody wants to encourage the days of yearly sequels, but there is a point where a follow-up arrives so late that the boat has already sailed. Payday 3 struggles to justify itself from the very start. This is why evergreen multiplayer games like Rainbow Six Siege and Destiny 2 proudly insist that there will not be any sequels for the foreseeable feature.
These issues are far more important than the graphics and only a major shift in terms of gameplay and features is ever going to justify starting again from scratch. Unfortunately, Payday 3 doesn’t come close to meeting that criteria, in what is a wholly insubstantial effort for a game that has been, theoretically, a decade in the making.
The Payday series started way back in 2011, as a four-player co-operative shooter heavily influenced by the end of the movie Heat and the beginning of The Dark Knight. In gameplay terms, it was also a bit like Counter-Strike, in terms of figuring out your weapon loadout. But it was always just you and your team against the AI, never fellow humans.
The biggest gameplay changes in Payday 3 revolve around what happens before the shooting starts. As in the previous games, you first have to case the joint, pretending to be an ordinary civilian. This preamble is much more involved this time around, with the various venues having better security, that require not just stealth but lock-picking and pickpocketing to acquire keycards and unlock doors ahead of time.
It’s not exactly Hitman but it’s a welcome change that helps to make the game seem more distinct from military shooters, while also playing into the robbery theme. There’s a lot at risk too, because if you get arrested at the preliminary stage, you’ll end up merely spectating during the main heist.
The heists have changed far less though. There are eight different jobs available at launch, from bank to art gallery and while they are very well designed and far more elaborate than the previous game, it begins to feel anticlimactic for everything to just end in a massive gun battle. The AI also remains the same, with the computer-controlled bots feeling like you’ve sat down to play with your gran, as they hobble about aimlessly, shooting at nothing and never bothering to pick up any loot.
The real problem is that most jobs can be completed in not much more than 15 minutes, leaving you with a sense of having seen all the basics of what the game has to offer. The variety of weapons has also shrunk from over 100 to barely 30, with the ability to customise guns with various attachments.
Payday 3 gets by on the novelty of its premise, its stage design, and because the core action is still solid, with some decent gunplay – although the shonky frame rate threatens to undermine even that positive. Predictably, the performance issues are accompanied by a range of other bugs and glitches, including the fact that the servers have been in disarray since launch.
The only real counter to these problems is that Payday 2 enjoyed solid support for a whole decade and while it never really evolved the gameplay, it did at least pack it full of content. But Payday 3 does not give nearly enough reasons to want to go through it all again.
So, the verdict on Payday 3? Maybe it'll be better in 10 years.
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