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A lot has changed in the heist game space since Payday 2 first broke the vault over a decade ago. Two years after its launch in 2013, the crime simulator went on to span two console generations, and dropped over 30 portions of DLC, including a very cool Hotline Miami crossover. As such, fans of the series have been pining for its third venture, Payday 3, for some time, but with the likes of GTA Online now dominating the virtual heist conversation, reinventing itself for the modern era was never likely to be straightforward.
Or so I thought. Because as it turns out, after spending a few hours reveling in Payday 3's criminal chaos over the last few days, all Starbreeze Studios and Overkill Software had to do for me was pretty things up visually and give us more of the same. Our Payday 3 review rightly laments this fact to a degree – suggesting the game leans "a little too heavily on fan-servicing familiarity" – but if high-stakes bank robbery ain't broken, don't fix it.
Making bank
Timelines between games in any multi-game-spanning series are rarely significant in any tangible way besides putting undue pressure on developers, but the gap between Payday 2, its next-gen rework in 2015, and its third mainline installment in 2023 is pretty pivotal in Payday 3's journey. Following the former's PS3 and Xbox 360 debut in August 2013, Overkill's golden goose graduated onto PS4 and Xbox One consoles two years later, in the shape of its definitive 'Crimewave Edition', that comprised over 30 slices of DLC and visual enhancements such as improved framerates and texture quality. To call this iteration of Payday 2 the quintessential and most approachable heist simulator wasn't unreasonable, with a Switch port also gracing Nintendo's flagship console in 2018.
Between times, though, GTA Online had other ideas. Its aptly named Heists Update was rolled out in March 2015, and marked the beginning of a sub-genre-defining path for the multiplayer crime sim. Less than a year prior, Rockstar was still officially communicating plans for fully-fledged GTA 5 single-player DLC (an abiding bone of contention among those players still waiting to this day), and yet the unprecedented popularity of The Fleeca Job, The Prison Break, The Humane Labs Raid, Series A Funding, and The Pacific Standard completely turned the trajectory of GTA Online on its head.
Fast forward eight years and some of the best multi-stage co-op heists are spread across Los Santos and Blaine County, with everything from The Doomsday Heist, to the assault on Cayo Perico island, and the Diamond Casino updates underlining GTA Online's spot as the champion of high-stakes video game stick-em-ups.
As a longstanding Payday 2 player, a seasoned GTA Online heist veteran, and a Payday 3 anticipator to varying degrees over the last decade, I was admittedly unsure of how the latter would carve out its slice of the pie in 2023 – particularly when Payday is, in essence, an extraction shooter, against the fact that we've seen so many of these games come and go in the last few years alone. But, unlike the likes of Evolve, Elite: Dangerous Arena, Back 4 Blood, Lawbreakers, Rainbow Six: Extraction, Battleborn, Amazon's Crucible, and even Battlefield 2042's Hazard Zone offshoot, it's that very dedication to fan service that, for me at least, lets Payday 3 rise above. It looks good, and, most importantly, it feels good, and that's not an easy thing to achieve in 2023 with such a big gap between mainline games.
"And while the above scenario wound up reflecting a deleted scene from Michael Mann's 1995 crime thriller Heat (most of your early ventures will, by the way), it's in Payday 3's quieter moments that I've had the most fun."
So far, I've jumped into Payday 3 with a squad of random players, a team full of bots, and alongside a few mates. Just like Payday 2, it's the latter that's above and beyond the most fun. Server issues have blighted the game's PC reception on Steam, granted – at the time of writing, its 'Mostly Negative' average takes direct aim at dodgy connections – but gathering pals is straightforward, on matching hardware and crossplay.
In one particularly memorable heist, my pals and I snuck into a high-end city center jewelry store by sneaking into the building's back alleyway, locating a QR code and breaching a security door. Once inside, we scrambled CCTV cameras, incapacitated guards, hid their bodies, hacked security systems, isolated alarm systems, stole loads of jewelry, made an arse of hiding bodies, got rumbled, shot a lot of SWAT police, and made off with somewhere in the vicinity of $100,000 in a helicopter that landed in the middle of one of New York City's busiest thoroughfares.
And while the above scenario wound up reflecting a deleted scene from Michael Mann's 1995 crime thriller Heat (most of your early ventures will, by the way), it's in Payday 3's quieter moments that I've had the most fun. Once the alarms are triggered, people start screaming and the cops descend on you like a spider trapping a fly, you've really only got one option: run and gun. Sure, you can hide and duck and cover as you make your way to the getaway spot, grabbing every piece of loot that you can carry en route, but the outcome is ultimately the same. You either live and prosper. Or die and start again.
Before the shit hits the fan though, Payday 3 feels like Hitman. It feels like Metal Gear Solid 5 or the second Dishonored game minus the magic. There are flashes of The Last of Us 2's top-drawer stealth mechanics, and the gadgetry that aids your path evokes anything from Sam Fischer's Splinter Cell escapades. Of course, there are strong GTA Online vibes here too, but that's partly because GTA Online itself learned from Starbreeze and Overkill's example all those years ago.
In Payday 3's here and now, sleuthing around establishments that you absolutely shouldn't be with mates on the other end of voice comms is simply great fun. Placing markers down in-game to highlight points of interest is thrilling, and finding yourself talking in hushed tones in real-life for some reason is hilarious, as if the virtual bank manager before you might cotton on to the fact you've just laid out Paul the security guard in the car park. She hasn't, not yet, and you'll do everything you can to make sure this remains the case for as long as you possibly can. And if the Payday series as a whole has taught us nothing else, it's that good things come to those who wait.
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