Payday 2 is probably my most played game of all time, I think I was Infamous 27/29? So I feel qualified to speak about the games state.

I started playing PD2 in 2014 so I was there for the highs and the extreme lows as they happened, even when the Drill Safe system happened the core game was fun and there was a ton of content and care still there. Payday 3 came out the gate to die.

There was always going to be way less content in Payday 3 given the new engine and just how much stuff was in Payday 2 due to years of DLCs and updates but I still didn't expect the bare bones state it came out in. Mix that with bare bones features and server issues and well you get what we have now... Dead game meme.

I would love to be corrected with future updates but as it stands now the game is just not there. What IS there is a fun cinematic feeling shooter that comes close to beating Payday 2 on the feel front but falls short. Stop putting stuff "on the table" and putting it in the game.

Okay so, this is gonna be more of an updated bunch of thoughts I’m sharing about Payday 3 as of February 2024 than a review. And yes, obviously most of these things that I will say are gonna be negative, but from someone who’s a passionate fan and only wants the best for the game.

The truth is I’ve been playing Payday 2 since before release, that’s over ten years now. I’ve accumulated thousands of hours across several platforms and went back and played Payday: The Heist as well. I was unbelievably excited about Payday 3, but… The game should not have come out so fast. If they said September 2024, hell, I would not be mad. We could have easily, and damn well merrily handled another year of Payday 2.

There are many issues to address with the game, I’ll start by saying it has the groundwork to truly be an amazing, fun, and complete package. The shooting and gunplay is very grounded and fun, the heists are very well designed and replayable, the new stealth system is greatly improved and challenging, but there’s a number of problems that stop all of that,

With the main one for me being, how the hell are you gonna sell this game as an all-in-all multiplayer/co-op experience to be enjoyed by friends and randoms alike across different platforms… But then, the game tries its absolute HARDEST, to prevent you from almost all of that.

When you finish a heist whether it’s with your friends or randoms, the game automatically kicks all of you out of the lobby and you’re back to being alone, having to look for them and invite them all again, the lobby system itself is so bad and doesn’t allow you to properly change anything, doesn’t allow you to unready if you accidentally ready up, doesn’t have a text chat, doesn’t allow you to kick players when the game has started, and much more.

In Payday 2 it was the simplest but most perfect system: If you join a random and finish a heist with them, the game automatically puts you into a lobby together, where you could chat and decide which heist to do next, change your weapons and loadouts, and so much more. I don’t understand what made them unable to simply carry this system over to Payday 3.

And the sad part is, this has been killing the game’s player base to the point where now, when you (for some reason) wait for minutes and minutes for a damn match, you just end up entering a lobby all alone, and have to wait for someone to join, and more often than not, nobody will.

This is my current main gripe with the game other than the obvious one: The lack of an offline mode, but that’s been discussed a lot already and I’d like to believe that it’s not exactly the devs fault but the notoriously money hungry publishers, Deep Silver.

But that’s sadly not all. There’s still a lot about the game that is missing or needs changing. The menus are… boring, bland, colorless and uninspired, they’re wonky to navigate and are annoying, customization is so lacking, weapon and mask customization is not nearly as good or detailed as Payday 2, and in general there’s barely any preset masks, not many goofy outfits, there’s no incentive to keep grinding.

And there’s so many other features and things that are beloved in this franchise that are missing for some unknown reason. Like… there's no melee weapons. You just hit enemies with your gun’s ass and that’s it. How the hell are you gonna take away melee weapons after Payday 2 was well-known for its wide and wacky selection of dumbass melee weapons ranging from comically large spoons to money stacks and katanas? W H Y ?

And of course many other things, like the lack of a jukebox/music selector before a heist, in a franchise with unbelievably beloved and popular music that even people who are not part of the game’s tight community have heard one or two tracks from it before. I don’t get it.

Overall, I say all of this as a passionate fan and player of over ten years who does not want to see the game/franchise crash and burn, and wants the devs to get it together and work to make the game become the best version of itself it can be, and that is still possible.

Once all of those issues are fixed, we can look forward to new content and DLC, and with all of that: We finally have a damn good Payday game. I really hope we can reach that. The game definitely needed a lot more time in the oven, but it’s okay, let’s try and be hopeful.

What a let down.

On a surface level PAYDAY 3 is still a fun enough co-op game to play with friends, but it's an unremarkable game that just cannot hold a candle to it's predecessor. At first glance it should be a straight improvement, the gunplay feels a lot better in PAYDAY 3 than PAYDAY 2 and the changes to stealth mechanics are a ton of fun, but even before getting to all the technical issues and problems outside of heist-to-heist gameplay the game just seems to lack soul.

The always online servers are a disaster and even to this day it feels like a gamble to play the game at all knowing that at any given second there's a chance we'll be thrown back to the menu and lose all progress we've made on a heist. The menus are terrible, poorly laid out and frustrating to navigate and lacking in over a decade of quality of life improvement PAYDAY 2 had built up over the years. The pricing on the season pass editions and recently released DLC are frankly disgustingly poor value and outright predatory trying to squeeze every penny they can out of what few loyal fans are left after the game flopped. The progression system is grindy, buggy and just plain tedious.

What should have been an easy win and seemed so promising given a bit of polish back in beta has turned out to be a complete let-down. What a sad way to end such an incredible series.

I am Almir DESTROYER OF PAYDAY 2, please buy my new game Payda-
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It's Payday 2 but now it looks like an early PS4 game. Come back in 5 years when one of two things happen: either the game gets good, or Overkill's wikipedia page will be written in past tense.

Goodness gracious...
Even without the online requirements killing the game after a measly couple days, it still falls flat from seemingly not learning anything from it's predecessor. It's visually pleasing as anything should be in the current year but that's about all it has going for it. Levelling is an absolute joke, leaving you no option but to do the heisting equivalent of chores just to progress; only to find there's practically nothing to obtain. The heists are just fine, customization is almost non existent, weapon variety is extremely limited with melee weapons not returning for some reason, ui is bland and unintuitive i could go on.

The game is a decent base for something special though that will undoubtedly take a very long time. with how the recent dlc has been priced it seems they still have not learned from any of their mistakes and i would not recommend buying anything to do with this game at full price at this time.

This is a game that just makes me sad. Despite its problems, Payday 2 is at the end of the day a fun arcade with a lot of pizazz. At the time I'm writing this review, Payday 3 has neither of those attributes. A boring aesthetic devoid of any personality, gameplay that drops Payday 2's breakneck high action arcade shooter formula for one that more resembles that of Payday: The Heist and its slower, more tactical formula, but without any of the design elements that made it work there and a narrative that, yes, is still picking up steam, but already feels like its just putting together a bunch of shit and hoping that it works.

Now you may be thinking, "janlz, why do you keep comparing this game to PDTH and PD2? You should be reviewing it based on it's own merit!"

But that's the thing.

This game has no own merit. The game is so dull, boring and at times borderline bad, that there's not much of anything to consider on that front. Both prequels had elements that put them above other games like them. This game has nothing, and that's really the whole problem.

It's a very generous 2 stars. The amount of ego to stand and say that they put all of what they've learned into this game is enough to piss me off. The gameplay is both a step up and a step down. Leveling up is a fucking chore. The UI is a mess. Stealth is great in concept but severely lacking on top of not being worth the trouble due to lack of XP it gives out. The music is not it, man. Customization is atrocious compared to 2. Locking the game to always online back fired so badly that I can't help but laugh and say that Overkill deserves the massive vibe check this game got them. They learned nothing from the Walking Dead. The saddest part is, I could forgive this game for its problems if it wasn't so god damn boring. I stuck with Payday 2 through it's controversies because it was still fun. Payday 3 has the look of 2, but none of the soul. And I sadly dunno if they'll be able to fix this mess.

Definitely the biggest disappointment in 2023 for me, Payday 2 is my 2nd most played game in steam, got all the achievements except for the last 2 dlcs and when I got the secret ending not much later they announced payday 3 and got so hyped, my thoughts on the beta were ''well it's very scuffed but it's just a beta, just a little taste of the full thing'' but when they made the ''full release'' I was jumpscared with regret, everything was the exact same or sometimes even worse than the beta, like you were literally unable to play the game because the genius devs thought it would be a good idea to make the game MULTIPLAYER ONLY so unless you found a sv with a random you couldn't do anything, worse than that you couldn't even play with your friends because there was no option to create a lobby anyways, and the gameplay? Incredibly boring and generic, trying to be covered up by the ''modern graphics and revolutionary mechanics''.
I was already angry when they took the perfect secret ending from payday 2 away from the gang, but when I played the game, damn. I couldn't even cry out of sadness and anger, it was like those moments where you're getting a scolding from your parents and they say ''I'm not even angry I'm just disappointed'' but from your parents perspective. Luckily enough I was able to refund it.

Held back by MANY issues, PAYDAY 3 had all the right tools to be the biggest coop title of the year.

With PAYDAY 2 being such a popular game even a decade after its' release, the third game was hyped and much anticipated. The changes to stealth, the gritty, realistic approach to the game, the gunplay, it all was supposed to be revolutionary and create a whole new era of heisting. And, to be perfectly fair, I defend that the developers did an excellent job when it comes to the aforementioned features.

But a lot is missing. A lot of content is gone, the server browser is non existent, the connection issues that spanned through the first month of the game being out, the unpolished and slow, sluggish menus. All this holds back PAYDAY 3, by a lot. PAYDAY 2 already had all these features, there is no excuse to the failure this game introduced us to.

I love PAYDAY 3. I want it to succeed, I genuinely prefer this new style of gameplay. But for my review to be higher, the game needs to improve drastically.