PAYDAY 2

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IamLEAM1983
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PAYDAY 2

Post by IamLEAM1983 »

We're forty seconds in and everything is set. I've set my cell phone jammer just across the room and zip-tied six hostages. One or more of them fidget every once in a while. They're nervous and terrified. I have to point fingers at them and raise my voice every now and then, so they stay still and well out of the windows' field of view. One guy is on camera duty, so the bank's security system doesn't trip. If he abandons his post, we're screwed.

I'm the Techie. I'm specialized in countermeasures and general workplace hackery. I'm the guy you call if you want to rig a voting machine's output during a gubernatorial race in Washington, and I'm surrounded by people who handle everything from manipulative empathy to heavy-duty weaponry. Our Thermal Drill specialist is hard at work on the bank's safe, and I find myself casting furtive glances in the direction from where I can hear the titanium bit's high-pitched whine and low-frequency rumbles. It's been, what, about a minute and a half? Thermal drills only need two minutes to cut through the kind of reinforced steel we've cased. No jobs ever go smoothly, in my experience. Somehow, somewhere, at some time, something's gonna go south. Our Eyes are trusted to a rookie. I myself aren't exactly a veteran bank robber, but I have eleven heists to my name. The first ones were horrible bungles, but the last four went off without a hitch. Michael Mann would've been proud.

My zombie-faced mask is hot and heavy. It makes me nervous, and I'd like to scratch my palms underneath the blue surgical gloves I'm wearing. Plus, I'm just not used to wearing suits at all, even if I've got a pretty beefy-looking ballistic vest strapped on underneath the jacket.

All Eyes has to do is stay on target. All he has to do is stay in the security room with his eye on the cams, well and truly out of sight.

One of the hostages gets up, but I know what it looks like when your meal tickets feel the need to stretch their legs. She looks young; maybe she's in her early thirties, and she wears the kind of power suit that just screams middle management for a “small-town banking outlet”. We don't care about the locals' valuables, we're after the millions in bearer bonds some mysterious high roller had stashed in this unassuming little corner of Anywhere, Suburban D.C.

It all happens simultaneously. First, there's the snap of Eyes' silenced pistol, and Middle Management Queen goes down. My temper flares, and I shout at the rook, telling him I had her under control, that she wasn't going anywhere. Then, as he's left the cameras, their default routine picks up and, sure enough, our bemasked selves are picked up by whatever sort of nifty Hollywood Camera AI was preventing them from sending an alert to the local precinct.

“Eyes blew it!” I shout. “About thirty seconds before the boys in blue show up!”

Curses are flung back at me, and I grit my teeth, swapping my pistol for my assault rifle. Eyes, in the meantime, is losing himself in nervous excuses, saying the lady had a clear line for the front door. I know this place, I cased it before. She didn't have a straight line and even if she did, I could have forced her back on her knees with a few curt words and a pistol's muzzle pressed against her head.

As sure as thunder after lightning, cop cars start to line the front entrance, and I know enough to figure out they're trying to encircle the place.

Four guys, minus one for the thermal drill, one First Aid kid with limited uses, our Assault guy's ammo packs... If the cops don't switch to SWAT gear, if no riot shields get involved, we might reach our getaway van. If that's blocked, there's always a sewer exit around the back, but there's always a chance we might be boxed in while making our escape. We have to carry bags weighing a hundred pounds at least, big blue hockey bags all stuffed to capacity with Benjamins.

I'm the scrawny one, though. I can't run with that much weight on my shoulders, and although the bag might cushion bullets sent my way from the rear, it also means I'll end up with perforated and useless dead presidents. Even now, I know how it's going to turn out. I have to run along with my own bag, toss it as soon as I've reached my limit, and whip back around to face the pigs while the other three make their getaway.

Man, don't I wish Heavy would plug a rifle round in Eyes' noggin, right about now... The moron can't keep an eye on cameras while going paranoid, and he'll end with half of my share of that money. Even if Bain negotiates for my release – which I know he will – I'll never see those dollar bills for myself.

Then, thankfully, the team leader spares me the frustration by votekicking Eyes out of the game.

Payday 2 is exactly what you've just read, Hollywood's approximation of a high-stakes heist transposed onto Left 4 Dead's basic frame. Play it right, and it unfolds as smoothly as what you've seen on the silver screen, with no hostages dying and our four miscreants covered by cool-as-Hell masks riding off into their dingy van that's stuffed to the brim with stolen dolla-dolla. Play it wrong, and it turns into a whole game based on the end-of-chapter segments of both L4D games, where successive waves of progressively more resistent cops do their darnest to shut you down. Instead of zombies, you'll find yourself facing plainclothes officers, SWAT unit members in rifle or shield-bearing variants, or Sam Fisher-alikes who somersault into play and viciously beat you down. It's essentially Left 4 Dead if by being extra careful, you were given the opportunity to finish the level without triggering a single appearance of the shambling horde.

Playing as either one of four determined ne'er-do-wells in snazzy suits and ties, it's your job to case a place you're about to hit as carefully as possible, only to then don your masks and attempt to control every inch of the situation. Almost invariably, something's going to slip someone's notice. Nothing is programmed, but everything depends on the ability and willingness of the entire team to commit to the stealth system. If anyone gets cold feet and decides to headshot a nosey guard and that silenced-if-still-sharp snap is heard by anyone, then the entire plan goes tits up. Rather than simply sticking a Game Over screen in your face, the game then chooses to indulge your inner reckless idiot by letting you switch to your more powerful piece so you'll have a prayer of being able to take down D.C.'s finest and live to tell the tale. The entire time, the main objectives that saw you get there are still active, so don't plan on going World War Three on the fuzz. The more you kill, the more they'll come. The more they'll come, the more your mark is going to be difficult to extract.

Pull things off well, and two measurements of your efficiency increase. First, half of your earned pile is transferred to a virtual offshore account. That part of the money can sit nice and pretty for as long as you'd like, or you can put it to use in offshore gambling sessions, in order to try and increase it. The other half becomes your available spending money, which you'll put to use for everything between buying or upgrading skills and equipment, to unlocking and purchasing new guns and miscellany. While the game offers four distinct skill trees based on four specific heist team archetypes, you're free to mix and match skillsets as you'd please.

Thematically, everything is tied to Crime.net, which is essentially a Craigslist for small-time crooks looking for jobs. What starts as bog-standard Hit-inspired bank heists could become nighttime museum snatch-and-grabs for a greedy collector who doesn't feel like paying his way into High Culture, or the messing-up of an incumbent senator's election results so his Leland Yee-worthy chunks of depravity are exposed to the masses. Everything you do can prospectively unfold as smoothly as you'd imagine, or you can move too much, shout too much, shoot the wrong people and generally stick yourself in a great big pile of stinking shit. One stand-out example I saw was something that started as an ordered hit against a small-time clan of Crystal Meth producers, only for the four us to find the vatos already ventilated. Our paying instances desiring a sample of these poor fools' drugs, we had to root around the house and its dependencies for associated chemicals. As long as we stayed quiet and didn't flash our mounted flashlights onto anything innocent or federally appointed, we did fine.

Then, one of our guys saw shadows moving in the forest across the street – and shot a pair of late-evening summer strollers.

Fuck.

Have you ever imagined performing a heart transplant while in the back of a moving car? Try breaking bad while the boys in blue are crawling through the windows and doors like well-armored and lethally sentient zombies clutching our MIRANDA rights in one hand and submachine guns in the other.

Yeah. That was fun.

Death, in Payday 2, isn't really death. If you're shot down and your teammates can't revive you, you're placed in custody. If you have any hostages on standby, your ever-present handler will try and negotiate for a prisoner exchange. Kill innocents, and the negotiations take longer. Start siphoning money or goods out of your target, and the negotiations also take longer. Losing a teammate can therefore negatively impact an entire heist, even if you're shown a nice and helpful timer that says Eyes will be relinquished to you in exchange for your hostage in two minutes and thirty seconds.

Naturally, this also means that going Tony Montana on a joint will cost you dearly if you do lose team members. If you haven't zip-tied anyone - at which point the game considers them to be a hostages – then you have no bargaining power. If you've got no bargaining power, your removed teammate stays gone.

Even so, the game does come with a third metric that does reward reckless approaches – it being Infamy. Rack up enough Infamy, and you'll earn special weapon attachments and perks, as well as unique mask designs. The game does, then, tentatively pull you towards the Dark Side of Bank Robbing or Mafia-Ordered-Shopping-Mall-Thrashing, as Infamy's benefits are more immediate and more readily accessible than those obtained through the long and hard road of planning everything through to obscene amounts. Of course, the flipside is that the Infamy rewards are inherently less powerful than those you'll obtain through the careful use of your stolen cash.

All things considered, however, it's up to you; considering how the obvious limitations of the game don't allow you to recreate The Dark Knight's opening scene. You can't off your teammates to have a bigger slice of the pie, and there isn't any class I'd call the Insanely Lucid Anarchist with a Thing for Grungy Facepaint. No sticking fake grenades in the mouth of William Fitchner the Fake Bank Administrator, either.

The word limited also applies to the art design. Payday 2, like its big brother, are products of the Swedish dev Overkill, which has recently become a Starbreeze imprint. Starbreeze can count on its Riddick titles to show it has a decent grasp on competitive FPS mechanics, but the technical aspects of the game are a bit uneven. Exterior environments have a sort of gritty, semi-realistic Michael Mann-esque feel to them, while interior textures can be a bit muddy in places. It's not quite last-gen, but it also isn't next-gen by any means. There's even environments and models that might make you gawp and wonder how anyone could consider this to be fair game in 2014. One of the heists has you raid a jewellery store and its attendant storefronts – one of which seems to be a kind of bakery-slash-café. You'll find cheesecake slices on display in the freezer that honestly look like they wouldn't be out of place on the PS2. Yummy, sure, but not terribly so.

All things considered, it's a scruffy little title that might be worth a Steam Sale, based on how tense its high-octane showdowns against the cops can get. If you've ever liked the narrative meat behind Grand Theft Auto V but thought that the recent entries lacked some sort of cohesiveness, you'll find something that seriously challenges Michael DeSanta's heist plans in terms of how visceral they feel.

Play with a great team, and you'll get the rare kind of rush, something that combines Portal 2's ability to make you feel like a genius with your average crime sandbox game's ability to make you feel like an unrepentant badass. A dastardly, genius badass surrounded by the best team ever put together on the wrong side of the law.

Play with stumbling newcomers, as I initially was one yesterday night, or players suffering from Call of Duty Impatience Syndrome, and you'll have to pull your tasks through to completion by the skin of your teeth. You won't feel smart, but you'll feel a bit germane to how Left 4 Dead's survivors probably did, when they managed to make a tight, clean and complete getaway.

Now you get to watch a bunch of happy fellas who have no clue or care about how to play effectively...


And you also get the awesome track that plays when shit hits the fan.


Now, would you kindly WATCH THE GODDAMN DRILL BIT, ALREADY?! IF THIS SHIT BREAKS AGAIN, IT'S COMING OUT OF YOUR SHARE, OKAY?! WE HAVE TO BE GONE IN FIVE MINUTES OR THERE'S NO PICKUP! GOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGO!
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