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Payday: The Heist is a robbery themed cooperative first-person shooter created by Overkill Software. The game has high resemblance to the infamous Left 4 Dead series in game mechanics and the UI, but with a different feeling in game play and tried to deliver more team play elements than many other similar titles.

Game Features

Like the Left 4 Dead series, the game features a 4 players cooperative multiplay and a team play oriented ystem. For example, you could deploy ammo or medkit bags to re-supply your team, or bring along cable ties to secure hostages for releasing your teammates when they are in custody. You could also help teammates up when they are shot down. The game also features a leveling system but it's quite linear and unnoticeable.


Game Play Videos

Game Play

However, when comparing this game to the Left 4 Dead series, I hardly find anything positive to write about when the Left 4 Dead series is almost superior in every aspects. For many reasons, the game fails to deliver the tension and fear which bank robber supposely face. The game turns out to be a simple shooter that becomes dull and boring quickly. The most disappoing part of this game is the highly repetitive and uninteresting quests. You follow one single path from the start to the end and there is no other open paths you could try to overcome the situations. There is no smarter way to rob a bank rather than killing everyone in your way.

For most of the time, you are restarting the drill on the security door, burning a hole, or waiting someone arrive while shooting every cops that come to you. The worst thing is the game is highly scripted and every game plays out the same. The drills jam at the same pattern, the cops come out from the same places, thus replaying a mission is simply meaningless. There are also many other situations in the game for which you have to camp at a place for several minutes (like restarting the drills or burning things), which does nothing but slow down the overall pace of the game down to a boring level.

The shooting experiecne is also inferior to the Left 4 Dead series. I found the hit detection very weird and it's hard to shoot with good precision. Also, the game features an auto-healing system which you only lose health when you are damaged while your outer skin is worn down. So with good patience you can clear most dangerous situations by camping behind covers, get some shoots and stay down to heal. The game is unexciting because you are always repeating the "camp and gun" strategy. Rushing through a mission like in Left 4 Dead is almost impossible because the enemies shoot too quickly and accurately. And most missions require you to wait at certain points so you have no choice but to fight. At times, you feel like playing a tower defense game rather than a shooter.

Final Verdict

The game has almost zero value in singleplayer because the AI bots are extremely dumb that he does not cover your back and may not help you up when you are shot down, causing instant game over when you are down. However, the multiplayer coop of this game could still be great fun, given the fact that you play with close friends and actively communicate with each others. Though, the fun comes from your friends rather than the game.

Official Website: http://www.overkillsoftware.com/payday/
Steam Store Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/24240/

Playing with friends or not, this game is boring as hell since every round are the same.

It cannot be compared to Left 4 Dead because every round of L4D are slightly different, like what kind of mob you would encounter in each location, are there any tanks to fight. You never know what would happen next when you play L4D, that's the fun part.

But every round are the same in Payday.

Mobs spawn in exactly the same timing, same location. Hell even they move in the same route.

There are no boss like Tank in L4D.

Mobs lacks variety. You kill those so called specials like a nameless mob.

Near all scenario contains part that you are required to kill ALL mob in the map to continue. This should not happen in a survival game. And in this kind of shit scenario, the player of Payday are usually required to hunt down some stuck mob, frustration.

The player can respawn after death with full health and ammo, but this is a survival game.

You cannot join a multiplayer game when its in progress.

You crashed to desktop when you are happy fragging with your friends, but you can't join the same game again, everyone had to quit the current game and do it again.

I can't even list all the serious flaws in this game.

This is probably the most horribly written review I have ever read.

Payday isn't the next L4D or anything like that, but you completely missed a good 75% of what makes this game what it is. It's obvious you only based it on the demo too, which is something you NEVER do as a critic. It almost seems like you bunked it down to the lowest difficulty while you were at it.

There are so many subtle things that affect how even the demo level plays. The fact that you kept on getting the same scenarios just meant you were playing it as a mindlessly as one plays L4D for the first time.

For example, you do not have to start the bank robbery right away and you probably shouldn't. The manager and many other NPCs spawn in different locations, so you have to plan the best way to take him down. When you DO pull out the guns, one of the bank tellers runs for a square on the right wall. If they manage to get to it before you kill them or preferably get them to stay down, then the silent alarm goes off. If they don't trip the silent alarm, then the cops take much longer to get to the bank. Also, if you're active in keeping hostage down, the cops don't swarm the place that much and are much more cautious. Shooting down the security cameras and deleting the footage from the laptop also hugely affect how the AI attacks the bank. If you play the game smart, you get more xp, money, and it plays much differently. If you play it like an idiot then you just get swarmed by cops the whole time.

There ARE special units like the tazer units which are VERY annoying if you don't attack them the right way.

You are correct about some of it's mechanics though. The aiming is weird in this game and trying to use fine-aim seems to just hinder what you can hit unless you're using the handgun.

I don't even believe the two of you play L4D very well since there are some higher level tactics you can use especially to prepare for zombie swarms or Tank battles. Though in L4D, I have quite literally beat the game by just running forward and mashing the beatdown button the whole time so that's another game that you can get a bad experience out of playing stupidly. Games like Payday and L4D are not so much about the game itself but how the player chooses to navigate the game. Also, it's these subtleties that you should be picking up on if you want to be a competent reviewer.

tl;dr: You're doing it wrong.

Thanks for the informative input. Much appreciate, and you are absolutely right that there are many 'smarter' way to play the game. Though it is not really my focus on the final verdict about this game as a whole.

Surely, payday is not L4D. But they share so many similarities in the design so it is fair to compare them, and without any comparation reviews are just pointless to say at least. If you ask me, I think I play L4D much more "well" than payday, since payday basically could not even get me going for a long time. What you said about shove spamming in L4D is absolutely correct but I feel the game is fun nonetheless. Even if you only follow the same path or apply the same strategy, L4D gives you something different each time because it is designed that way. Like the position of the witch, the different approach of the tank and some random behavior of the mobs could make it a different result on another day even if you try to do the same thing every time. That is what making people keep replaying that game even they have done all the mission like 100 times already.

Although L4D is even more limited when it comes to choices, but at least the fighting parts of L4D is a lot more interesting to cover such insufficiency. In L4D, there are 8 unique enemies in addition to witch and tank and the normal mobs. In L4D, the 4 players need to support each others very well if they want to be successful in higher difficulty, like making good use of fuel tanks, grenades, setting up choke points and choose a weapon that could support each other. But payday is more of a camping game when it comes to fighting a large horde of mobs and thats disappointing.

About the game play in payday, you surely cannot just repeat the same process like in L4D because it gets very tedious quickly (for many reasons). Well, you could fight little to no mobs for the first half of the game if you do the preparation work properly in some missions, but it does not really change the whole scenario in any way. Rather, what I was trying to suggest is that the game lacks the alternative choices that could lead to a different path or even the ending of a mission. If you are suggesting that it is not a mindless shooter like L4D, this kind of design is essential simply because it turns out to be mindless without any. At the current state of payday, what is the point of replaying a mission if you have already beaten the highest difficulty of it?

The thing is there is only "one ultimate way" to beat the highest difficulty (like shooting security cameras and all that), but not a chance to win using the brutal approach. So it comes down to no variation if you think that way. Not to mention you cannot avoid restarting the drills no matter what. That is, I am not saying there are no alternative ways to play payday but the game does not deliver the fun it should no matter which way you play it.

Also, my final verdict has something to do with the design flaws of the game as a whole. As a bank robbery simulation, we should be able to move the hostages or use them as meat shields. And the system that you could release a hostage for returning a member in custody needs some improvement. As a shooter, the aiming imprementation is just too bad to be a good one. As a survival game, the auto-healing system should not be used at all and there should be alternative ways to avoid fighting the mobs or to rush through a mission. What I think about payday is that it is neither a good mix of shooter and realistic simulation at the same time not interesting even if you try to play it "properly".