Payday 2 - Get in on this game NNNAAAOOO! :)

[hfam]

My Hak5 brothers and sisters, if you're into first person shooters, seedy crime movies, and lots of fun, you likely already have Payday 2.

If you don't....GET IT NOW!!

This has to be one of the most underrated, under-advertised, most fun games I've ever played!! And the price is right too!!

$34.99 via Xbox Live download

$29.99 on Steam

$39.99 if you want a disk

Long story short, pre-release, I was channel surfing on a Sunday am and happened across the last 30 seconds of a bit in some electronics review type show, heard the name, saw 3 seconds of game play, and thought "hmmmm....."

So, I happened to "get a copy" for my "totally legit unmodded Sony-approved PS3" a few days before release, and fell in LOVE with it!!

I bought 2 copies for Xbox (one for me, one for my son), and a copy on Steam to play on lunch hour with my buddies (who also bought copies via Steam).

Onto the game! It's based in some ambiguous metro area, where various jobs are popping up in crime net...initially these are fairly simple jobs...jewelry store hits, "four store" hits, bank hits, and a few others. You get a crew of 4 people (including yourself). You pick a job, and others will join, or you can kick it off with the rest of the crew being AI. The AI isn't too bad actually, but you'll want to find people to play with (not hard, lots of great folks out there for this one).

You have 4 skill paths you can follow: Mastermind (health, domination), Technician (c4, explosives), Ghost (electronics, jammers, etc) and another I can't remember right now, but (guns, ammo, firepower). You can mix match your tiers of skills, and re-spec your skill sets as well. When looking for others to play, it's good to get a complimentary array of these skills, but they don't have to be, it's always fun.

You level up as you play, get skill points to spend, get money from your jobs, and lots of ways to get extra cash, etc. At the end of the rounds you can win new masks, new weapons and attachments, etc...which then become available for you to purchase between jobs.

As you level up, new job types open up to you, which are worth more points and cash. Those jobs are more complex and can take 2-3 days (in game time) to complete. For instance:

Watchdogs - Day 1 you and the crew are in a truck with 9 duffel bags of coke which crashes. The cops are outside, and you need to get the coke out of there safely. The boss sends you a driver, and there are cops everwhere. Sometimes things go bad, your driver gets smoked by the cops, and the boss has to send a helicopter to get your crew and the coke out of there. That's day 1. Day 2, you need to take the coke and get it onto a boat at the docks..holding out between rounds until the boat returns for more bags of the coke.

There are lot of other job types and subtleties I won't go into detail in here, but you get the idea, and you really need to work together as a crew to get the job done and get the most out of it. It's tons of fun!

The jobs themselves are extremely fun. You can try to "stealth" the mission, take out the guards, answer the pagers, avoid cameras and suspicion by civilians, etc, get the objective, and escape before the alarms go off or cops arrive.

If you blow it, you "go loud" and must shout all the civilians down, zip tie them so they don't get in the way (shooting civvies costs you money), as the cops, FBI, etc, start showing up and you're in a massive shootout to get the jewels, cash, etc, out of the area and into the escape van.

Anyhow, you get the idea. It s a VERY unique game in many respects, and if you like a good crime movie (think Oceans Eleven, etc), you will LOVE this game. There is a lot more to this game than I'm willing to type out here, but you get the jist of it, and can probably determine if the game's for you or not based on this info.

One AWESOME bonus about mulitplayer in this game: The shouting, foulmouthed 12 year olds screaming "ni**a this and b**ch that" in castrati soprano voices are almost non-existent! I've quickly amassed a great group of about a dozen players who all appreciate the game, and play seriously, but have fun too. You''ll find those that you prefer working with on your crew of 4, and take it from there!

Summary: Payday 2 is the underdog of the year in my opinion. This flew entirely under the radar and I never saw a single ad for this game, but it is really well done, the devs came up with a real winner here, a unique gaming experience, and I expect as word gets out this game will take off even more. Really fun game, really good people to play with, and the DLC hasn't even come out yet!!

Edited September 12, 2013 by hfam