I wanted to start with a review of a more recent game before going into some of my childhood favorites later down the line. Payday 2 is the most recent addition to my list of favorites.
Payday 2 is a four-player co-op shooter based on the heist movies of old (ex: Heat, Scarface etc) where you and up to 3 other players worldwide play as 4 of a cast of 17 heisters who will be committing crimes to make as much bank as possible. You do this by taking contracts through the Crime.net system where you can either join a lobby with other players or create your own lobby through the random contracts popping up or using some in game money to buy a contract that you want.
There are currently 5 currencies in-game; spending cash, offshore money, continental coins, skill points and xp. When you and your team complete a contract the whole team will get xp and money for doing so. All players get the same amount of xp and money (Its not split among players all players get the full amount of money for completion.) Money you get from completing a contract will be split between spending cash and offshore money. Spending cash will be used for buying weapons and equipping them with mods to affect their stats. Offshore money is used for buying contracts you want to play when the random ones appearing on crime.net don't appeal to you and as benchmarks for raising your status among thieves. Continental coins are a bonus for completing cretin challenges and can be used to either buy weapon mods or upgrading your safe house.
Payday 2 has a leveling system where you gain xp to gain levels so you get more skillpoints to go further down the skill trees. This is where we come into the replayability of Payday 2. Max level is 100 but, once you reach 100 you can Infamy to reset your level and gain a level of infamy which goes up to 25. Raising infamy also nets you an infamy point to use on a web of rewards. Playing with many different players around the world
The skill trees are broken into 5 main trees with 3 sub trees in each main tree. Finding what skills best suit your weapons, perks, and armor is what separates good players from bad ones. Teamwork is key however for harder difficulties. Difficulties go from normal to hard to very hard to overkill to mayhem to deathwish to one down. Once you learn the game mechanics however all difficulties below mayhem will become super easy and ypou will probably never even play normal, hard and very hard after you have learned the games mechanics enough.
Now to the elephant in the room.the almost $180 of dlc. This may sound off putting at first but, I would only suggesting getting dlc once you know you like the game enough to play it on a regular basis and even then i would only recommended a few of the dlcs. See overkill had a great idea on how the contracts work. Any player can join any lobby even if a player is joining a dlc contract that they don't have they can still play it. So right off the bat if you aren't going to be hosting a lot of lobbies the dlcs that add contracts are less valuable. Further there are a great number of variety packs that add a good amout of varied content. For those who end up liking the game enough to want to play regularly I would point you towards Connor Shaw's video What DLC to get as i agree with his list of what dlc you should get once you are committed to playing Payday 2 regularly.
Now to the other major problem a lot of people have with Payday 2. the gun skins. Payday 2 has the same skins system as CS GO with skins that have variable rarity and conditions. They went a step further and skins can have stat boost on them that can be as minuscule as 4 stability or accuracy to as good as 3 extra concealment points. A lot of the community blew up when this hit but, in all honesty I don;t think that this system was a bad addition but, the way the large minority self destructed over this was embarrassing to watch.
Payday 2 features 2 styles of play Loud ans Stealth but, some contracts can only be done stealth and some can only be done loud. Stealth is as it sounds you sneak around avoiding detection to complete your objectives. To me stealth is boring and deeply outdated compaired to loud so i won't go deep into it (Jamesblack47's video pretty much sums up my thoughts on stealth.) Loud is more what you would expect from a co-op shooter. You're committing crime after all so the police come in waves to try and stop you. You and your team have to fight off waves of cops while trying to finish your contracts objectives so you can escape into the distance and reap in your rewards.
There really isn't a main story to Payday 2 each contract has pretty much just has a reason for you to be doing it and that's about all for story aside from a few exceptions. Overall, I really enjoy Payday 2. It's endless replayability means i rarely go a couple days without playing it for a good couple hours. The modding scene adds even more to the game to the point where I've put in 1767 hours into it at the time of writing and still will probably be playing it for years to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment