The Payday 3 lead guard and how to deal with them

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The Lead Guard in Payday 3 is an overkill-specific enemy with regular radio calls and random patrol routes

Payday 3
(Image credit: Starbreeze)

The Payday 3 lead guard is probably the hardest element of doing any heist on overkill, a unique enemy who shows up on the game's hardest difficulty to become an erratic wildcard element that you'll need to deal with for most of the heist itself, at least until things go loud and you gun them down. For those who need some tips on how to deal with this agonizing foe, here's everything you need to know about the lead guard in Payday 3, overkill's most overkill element.

The lead guard in Payday 3 explained

Payday 3 lead guard

(Image credit: Starbreeze)

Here's what you need to know about the Lead Guard in Payday 3:

  • The lead guard only appears on Overkill difficulty
  • They are marked out from the rest of the guards by a security cap and bulletproof vest
  • They take random patrol routes through practically all parts of the map
  • When killed, they have their radio go off and need answering roughly once per minute, without limit

Clearly this is a problem if you're trying to beat a heist in stealth, as A), the guard can wander around erratically and catch you at a bad time, and B), if you kill them you have to keep answering their radio, without end.

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I found that the best approach was, assuming you're not on solo, to simply have somebody on "Lead Guard guard duty", so to speak - as in, a player who constantly follows the lead guard around and keeps an eye on them so they can't interrupt what everybody else is doing. You basically don't want to kill the lead guard at all if you can help it, as the limited radio calls on Overkill mode mean you can only bluff your way through a couple of them before everything goes into alarm mode.

If you do kill the lead guard, it's time to go very fast, as you won't have long before alarms go off. Rush whatever you're doing to see if you can grab the loot in stealth mode, as you'll have, at most, a couple of minutes - and even that's assuming you have all your radio responses left and a player constantly answering their pager.

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Joel Franey
Joel Franey
Guides Editor, GamesRadar+

Joel Franey is a writer, journalist, podcaster and Very Tired Man with a BA from Brunel University, a Masters from Sussex University and a decade working in games journalism, often focused on guides coverage but also in reviews, features and news. His love of games is strongest when it comes to groundbreaking narratives like Disco Elysium, UnderTale and Baldur's Gate 3, as well as innovative or refined gameplay experiences like XCOM, Sifu, Arkham Asylum or Slay the Spire. He is a firm believer that the vast majority of games would be improved by adding a grappling hook, and if they already have one, they should probably add another just to be safe. You can find old work of his at Eurogamer, Gfinity, USgamer, SFX Magazine, RPS, Dicebreaker, VG247, and more.