Payday 2: Midland Ranch Heist Review (Tiretracker)
This is pretty much Goat Simulator part 2.
The hype was big, the only thing bigger was the level itself.
Minimum playtime for Midland Ranch is on average over 30 minutes. Everything is long and drawn out and theres not much in place to remind you why you're really here doing what, like most of Locke's contracts.
Its an exceedingly large map with next to 0 sniper spawns ----- because they are replaced mostly with US Marshals: low powered Sniper units that filter through the normal rank and file on the ground.
The goals are hazy and require covering almost every inch of the map just to get 5% done if playing solo. You have about 3-4 barns each almost indistingusihable from the other from the inside, causing me to get lost very frequently even after 4 plays.
Lets touch on that for a minute. This level is very vast and has multiple areas and even golf carts to traverse it with.
This seems to encourage players to split up which is a terrible thing to train players to do if this is the first heist they join into. Even if its not conscously encouraged that is what happens 90% of the time because with such an open area and multiple tasks to complete, everyone is inevitably going to have thier own ideas of what should be done first, and are very unlikely to trust your judgement and follow you to one you're doing.
This is boring and easy to get lost in, objectives are arbitary with locke saying "We're here we might as well do this thing for no reason" even though they can just simply rebuild the workbenches you destroy from any hardware store. Yet you cannot progress in the mission at all until you've placed every single C4 which falls to the responsibility to whomever picks it up off the table, additional C4 cannot be acquired.
Playing offline solo is absolutely unpleasant on anything higher than normal because you're going to get burned out a quarter of the way just trying to find your way to the next objective.
If you do not have human friends to play with you will not enjoy this, the bots compound the drudging you will do trying to navigate the map. If you are expecting this to be a hiest you can replay multiple times you will be mistaken. This is like Big Oil where you do it once and usually avoid it later on because you don't rememeber having fun.
And all you're doing is building some AK17 rifles that you may already own on workbenches that anyone can easily softlock by scattering the contents to other workbenches. The golf cart can get stuck almost permanently within 6 feet of its spawn area, and it is somehow FASTER than the Longfellow, with wihhc you're trying to navigate a very tight arena.
I want to refund this but I waited too long. I don't see myself enjoying this casually. The stakes and time investment are too high for too little reward.