PayDay: The Heist Review

I've owned a copy of PayDay: The Heist for a while -- nearly a month, in fact -- and although I've played plenty of other games since this download arrived, PayDay memories still bring a smile to my face. Nix getting killed outside the bank vault over and over again, exchanging my first hostage for a teammate, Ben Dickens and I massacring a SWAT team while monitoring the second floor of a drug den -- this game turned the IGN office into a screaming match. PayDay: The Heist is stiff and unintuitive in spots, but the overall package is a fun and a welcome addition to the PlayStation Network.

PayDay: The Heist Video Review
If you've seen Point Break or played Left 4 Dead, wrapping your head around PayDay: The Heist is easy. A cooperative first-person shooter, PayDay casts you and three bots or online friends as thieves and gives you six different jobs to go out on. Missions range from a bank heist to breaking out a prisoner to getting away from a job gone wrong, and enemy tactics change depending on how you're tackling a job.

When I first started playing, I assumed these situations would get stale as the mission objectives don't change -- you're always doing the same action in the same place -- but PayDay keeps it interesting with its dynamic leveling system. Your character evolves as you play and that tweaks the game's various heists. Each time you level up, you unlock a new weapon, item or bonus from the experience tree you have active. See, there are three trees and you can switch between them at any time. This is important to point out in the review because PayDay never explains this system in the game. I had to call the folks behind PayDay to get an explanation of how the trees work. PayDay's menus tend to just throw text at you and leave you to figure it out. I'm sure most people will do just that, but I know some folks will just walk away in frustration.

That's a shame because the skill trees are worth getting to the bottom of -- there are more than 140 levels to achieve. Once you get an established crew together, you can build teams where everyone has a specialized function. You can have a medic, an ammo man, a dude whose sole job is to handcuff hostages; it all depends on which tree a given player has been investing in. That kind of role-playing is great for people who want to nerd out and plan missions.

Playing heists over and over again is the point of PayDay. Each time I started a job, I was out to do better than the time before. I'd warn new teammates about faulty drills, coordinate taking out security cameras, and call out cops that needed to be wiped out. It was actually a bit creepy (yet thrilling) how well my friends and I transitioned into the role of criminals. We'd pull our guns, put on our clown masks, and begin working as a unit. Cue the in-office screaming and me loving the atmosphere.


But make no mistake about it, the "we" was a big part of the good time. PayDay: The Heist packs a single-player option that pairs you with AI teammates, but it's only good for getting to know the maps and working on leveling up. The game shines when you play it with friends using headsets, and even then, dumb enemies and stiff gunplay can spoil some people's good time.

PayDay really stumbles when it comes to presentation and polish. Objectives populate every map and change as the job progresses (go here, bomb this, capture that). However, the game doesn't bother explaining them all that well. There's a part in the first mission where you have to wait for a fire to eat through a bank vault's ceiling, and every time someone new played with me, they'd think we missed something or screwed something up as the fire just burns and burns and burns. There's no countdown, and the majority of the references to the process are in-game audio lines that get lost when players are jabbering at each other.

The game just feels clunky at times whether it's an enemy spawning from thin air or someone clipping through a wall.

• More PlayStation 3 Reviews
• Latest PlayStation 3 News, Reviews, and Videos