It’s a quiet and sunny weekday afternoon. You stop by the bank to get some cash to spend on your date tonight. Standing in line, you glance around at the surroundings and people to kill the time, the guy behind you is in a suit and gloves, odd, but you don’t think much of it.

“Alright if everyone remains calm, you all can get out of this alive.” You hear a voice and look up. You see man sporting a clown mask holding an Ak-47 in the back of the bank manager emerging from the back. Beads of sweat soak your brow; turning around seeing the man behind you in a clown mask.

In anticipation of the Sequel hitting the market in August, I thought I do a review of the original and also one of my favorite games in the past couple years. Without further ado, here we go.

Story and Characters:

Payday: The Heist centers around the adventures of a four man crew of clown mask wearing robbers (Dark Knight much? Heheeh) as the work to make it big by robbing: banks and jewelry stores, fancy high class parties and screwing over gang bangers. The crew consists of: Dallas, who is pretty much the leader, Chains, Wolf, Hoxton a.k.a Hoxtalicious and their informant/ negotiator Bain

That’s about as far as this side of the game is concerned, but that’s all you need in my book. The characters are shrouded in mystery and do have small back stories (Chains was a former Navy SEAL) and their personalities shine through during missions. (Hoxton gives each of his crew member’s nicknames)

Gameplay:

Payday is gameplay heavy. It is a four player co-op first person shooter that feels like another popular game, Left 4 Dead. What you do during missions varies but they follow the same basic idea, infiltrate the area, round up hostages, hold out against the cops until you can get your valuables and fight till you can escape. How things go is up to you (unless you screw up). Either you take the stealth route, not waste a single bullet or kill a single cop, slip in and slip out or, you go in guns blazing. Some levels well encourage using a specific method for the best success. The enemy is the entire might of the Badge ranging from: Security guards to SWAT, along with special enemies like the Taser squad and the heavily armored “Juggernauts”. You are outfitted with your primary assault rifle and your secondary pistol (you’ll unlock more weapons as you level up). Other gear are things like: ammo bags, med kits and cable ties to take hostages, which you’ll need to trade to crew members if they get arrested (if your unable revive them if they get downed) and Drills to cut into things like vaults doors( you need to check up on the drills a lot cause they break down)

Appeal:

Who is going to play it? Let’s look at the list:

It’s an FPS game

It’s at its best with one or more buddies

It’s available on PSN and Windows (Number 2 will be available on all consoles as well as pc)

It’s rated M, but it’s a “light” M

It’s about twenty dollars on Steam, good for cheap weekend fun

It references other popular heist based media like Point Break (there is a mask pack of presidential figures like Obama and Bush) and as I said earlier it plays like the Left 4 Dead games, the developers created a DLC based around the No Mercy hospital level of the first L4D, before the outbreak, the crew is tasked with retrieve the blood of a patient. This DLC comes with Masks based around the special zombies like the boomer also a Cameo by Bill.

Overall: This game rates for me 3.8 out of 5. If you’re interested give it a go and be on the lookout for number 2.

Thanks for reading ^-^