Valentine’s Day: The Heist

Nothing says “I love you” more than robbing a bank together. Even if it’s four guys with a fetish for masks and gold.

In Payday: The Heist your fine self, and up to three other humans/A.I.s aim to steal as much money as you can, whilst under the imminent threat of being tazed in the groin. You’re not really the bad guys in all this though, as you’re not just going for banks, but you’re more often tasked with stealing money gained through illegal means. Think of yourselves as a modern Robin Hood and his band of merry miscreants, as you don’t give the money to the poor afterwards (unless you include yourselves).

Teamwork is key in this game, along with communication. The levels will see the team separated as the drills/circular saws/computers have jammed or crashed at the most inopportune times, and on opposite sides of the map, so you need to be able to trust each other.

What I love about Payday, is that the games are pseudo-random, and that the difficulty curve is punishing. For example, in one mission, you’ll have a limo dropped onto a roof. However, there’s a good chance that it’ll break through the ceiling and fall down a stairwell, stopping at any floor. Enemies can spawn from random locations around this randomly-located car, so it’s tough to get a strategy that works everytime. Overkill (the highest difficulty that most people will encounter) alters parts of the level sometimes – possibly filling a once-safe room with timed explosives that’ll turn you into pink mist if you’re not fast enough.

There’s a simple levelling system, where you don’t use experience for improving your equipment, but cold, hard cash. Headshots etc. won’t give you more points, but it’ll mean you actually get to live long enough to possibly finish the level. There are three (four if you get the Wolf Pack DLC) different unlock routes – assault, sharpshooter, support (and technician, with the DLC). Any time during a mission, you can change which path you’re on, and when you pick up enough money to increase your reputation level, you get the unlock from that class. The path you travel has no impact on your gameplay, and due to some upgrades being locked until you reach a certain level, it’s impossible to simply expand along one tree – you need to diversify. With this system, until you’re at the highest levels, there’s a good chance your team will all have slightly different unlocks.

Your enemy in this game is the police, in all it’s shapes and forms. The enemies will dribble in, until there’s an assault, when you’ll be swamped by unlimited enemies until the timer runs out. Just like L4D2 (there’s a lot of inter-weaving of the two universes, I won’t spoil much) there are special cops – some with tazers, riot shields, snipers and the dreaded bulldozer, more affectionately known as ‘that goddamn astronaut guy’, so it’s not always a one-sided slaughter of cops.

Stealth isn’t needed in this game, but it helps. There’s one mission where you can finish without anyone even noticing you there, whilst on others, the police are going to turn up at a set time, and you can’t stop it from happening.

If there is one modern game that I would have to tout as having the largest replayability value, this game would be one of the top contenders. Just a few months ago, a team managed to find a massive hidden vault in the first level – it took months of research and work to complete the puzzles needed to reach the final vault. Payday 2 is in the works, and it should be a great game if they follow the same recipe – I have only one request – give a versus mode, where humans can play as the special cops, trying to stop the heisters.