Payday 3 Review (Laner2045)
After 10 years of waiting it breaks my heart to say this, but this is NOT PAYDAY 3, it is PAYDAY 1.5
These past few months, I couldn't help but wonder how content was still regularly being published for PAYDAY 2. Considering how much OVERKILL Studios has loved and cared for this franchise for over a decade now, I just assumed they were able to juggle that content with development on PAYDAY 3. That is, until I realized this game was NOT made by OVERKILL Studios, no, the PAYDAY series was stolen by OVERKILL's publisher, Starbreeze Studios; and what a mess they have made.
Now, PAYDAY 3 is not the "worst" game ever made. The gameplay is solid, the heists are enjoyable, and the enemies are fantastic. On paper, this should be a fantastic entry in the PAYDAY series, and it would be! If it had been released after PAYDAY: The Heist, a game that first released in 2011.
Because this is NOT PAYDAY 3, it is PAYDAY 1.5! Almost everything that was added in the transition from PAYDAY 1 to 2 is simply gone! Concealment? Gone. Unique skill trees? Gone. Meaningful weapon attachments? Gone. Multi-Day Heists? GONE! Starbreeze studios had the audacity to take this franchise from the people who made it in the first place (OVERKILL Studios), because they presumably had some kind of vision. Hopefully it would be a good one?
Wrong, their vision was stripping everything away from PAYDAY 2 that made it unique ("complicated"), so that it would be more palatable to casual and console players (OF WHICH I TYPICALLY AM). In doing so, they have completely alienated the audience who have waited TEN YEARS for this game. It's a joke, and it just makes me so sad.
To whoever is reading this, I need you to understand that I am not a spiteful person. I so desperately wanted this game to be amazing, but unfortunately I'm not even sure it's "good". That is something I never imagined myself saying about the PAYDAY series. I've never even written a review before but that is how badly I needed to share these thoughts!
To sum it up, Starbreeze Studios took an amazing series away from a studio that worked very hard to make it into what it has been this past decade. Their reasoning? To make a quick buck doing as little work as possible. Stick to publishing, Starbreeze, and don't you dare find a way to blame this mess on OVERKILL Studios.