The recent installment in the payday franchise titled “Payday 3” was released Sept. 21 and it’s a downgrade to their previous game. There are many aspects within “Payday 3” that ruin the gameplay, playing it with friends and attempting to customize your loadout.
The game consists of eight missions that give you different amounts of money depending on the difficulty you want the AIs to give you a bigger challenge. There are four difficulties that can be chosen: normal, hard, very hard and overkill.
The first component that hurts the game is that there isn’t any single-player mode. You need to have a starbreeze-nebula account in order to play the game. I do understand that this will be needed for cross-play, but most of the players are more inclined to play solo.
The game is always online; there is no offline mode. When you get into a solo game, there is no pausing.
Another main issue with the game is the servers. It’ll take a while before you even join a game. I tried matchmaking into a game, it took 30 minutes and at the end, it kicked me to the menu on a matchmaking error.
There are problems with the servers that destroy the flow of the game and want to grind for money.
Also, the XP progression system within the game is terrible. The only way to gain XP is through random challenges and to use every gun in the game. One can cap out on XP and still not gain any more XP for playing with guns you enjoy using.
You don’t gain XP by completing missions, it’s all through the challenges.
After finishing missions, you are forced to disband from the teammates you were playing with. You can’t add them as friends when the whole point was to encourage community building and sticking together. In the previous installment “Payday 2,” the public community was strong, but this game killed that and I do hope they change this in the near future.
The final issue with the game is the weapon-buying UI. When you go to buy another weapon, the primaries and secondaries are all in one section, so it makes it more difficult to know which ones are which. I then found out that secondaries are pistols and primaries are all the other guns available to purchase.
There also aren’t that many weapons in the shop which I hope increases with DLCs and future updates.
Even with the many problems in the game, there are a couple of positives that make the game feel better than the second installment. The civilian AI is improved, civilians that follow you are running, you can’t be instantly detected, the sliding ability makes the game more fun and running while carrying items has been enhanced.
That’s really it. There are more cons than pros for “Payday 3” and I would recommend playing the second installment rather than this one. The game isn’t worth the $40 price tag that it has. I would give this game a four out of ten review.
