There’s a jewelry store down the street. Doesn’t look like there are any security guards around it. A uniformed police officer mans a hotdog stand to the right. Since when did cops run hotdogs stands, anyway? Our burglar decides to keep an eye on him, just in case. You never know when there’s going to be a swarm of SWAT and FBI Hostage Rescue Teams charging blindly towards you, killing themselves by the hundreds until they smother you to death.
From the intro scene, it’s clear that the game is trying to evoke the heist films of the nineties, complete with monochrome fade-ins and campy alt rock. Naturally, I fully expect to be able to jump from one moving vehicle to another. This hope is quickly dashed as I realize that the game doesn’t support vehicles. That’s alright.
There’s a quick tour around the criminal’s base of operations. It’s a basement complete with dummy safes to crack, a firing range, an armory, and all manner of gadgets. It’s basically a super-villain lair. There’s a single laptop on a desk, labeled ‘CRIME.net’. This turns out to be Urbanspoon for criminals.
I find a bank robbery and hop on with three others. The mastermind says something about watching for cameras, and a blinky thing keeps on telling me to get the thermal drill. We walk in casually to case the place and…someone spooks a bank teller. The alarm goes off and all hell breaks lose. Do we have enough hostages?
It doesn’t seem to matter as the SWAT barge in through the windows. They seem easy enough to kill, and my bulletproof vest is capable of soaking up what seems like a full magazine. Then the armored HRT units start coming in. It doesn’t stop. I’m certain we’ve killed a couple hundred, but they keep flowing in. There’s no crazy plan to get the goods and hide, and we’ve got nothing to do but keep on killing them.
It’s become Counter-Strike with endlessly re-spawning bots. Occasionally, someone will yell ‘shielder’ or ‘juggernaut’, and you see how this is a game that came from Left 4 Dead. It’s like yelling ‘smoker’ or ‘witch’. The dreaded ‘taser’ proves that in PAYDAY 2, they might as well be phasers.
After about half an hour of this, I wonder…where’s all the perfectly timed moves? The climbing in through vents? Hacking a computer with bleep boop gadgets? Hanging from a pipe? If I wanted to play Counter-Strike, I’d play Counter-Strike, damn it. Turns out, it exists in the game, minus the acrobatics.
There’s plenty of missions that allow for the kind of stealthy heist that we’ve come to expect from nineties television. Let’s get back to the jewelry heist. The enforcer and I sneak down an alley behind the jewelry store. We find a guard- the enforcer takes him out and answers his pager, in order not to alarm the security company. We hide the body in a trash container. The cameras are hacked. Our mastermind stockholm syndromes a HRT agent into joining us. I blow up the door into the safe, and my mates make sure no one calls the police or trips an alarm. There’s nothing in the safe, so we empty the display shelves. We get out, but we’ve taken too long and the cops catch up to us. There’s a shootout. We kill a few dozen, and we’re home free.
That’s the kind of thing I was expecting from the game- perfectly planned heists that always go wrong and devolve into a shootout, because god damn it, that’s what we’ve come to expect from Reservoir Dogs and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. This is the game at it’s best. It’s unfortunate that it rarely plays like that, and the rest just isn’t worth the thirty dollars it costs. Keep in mind that this is a game that’s still in development, and we have no idea if the cops will eventually be player-controlled. It’s just that stealth seems pointless, and we’re encouraged to flail about like teenagers on meth until someone calls the zombie cops.
Rule of three 