I found something out what really makes me angry about that game. It starts really promissing: You enter the hospital, for example and you´re about to start the heist. All good. You are cocentrating on your objective and you´re really into that "I can play the bad guys" setting.
But, and its the same in every mission, after you set up a saw, for example, to break a door, which takes about 5 minutes which is ridiculous enough to break a door...., the bad thing begins.

From now on, that game is about to shoot. And kill. And shoot. And kill. I could continue. All you have to do is to shoot the police, which is extremely boring, the game tells you like " forget about your objective, just shoot as many cops as you can".
After you did that, and the door finally got open, you have to break another door, of course you have to wait 5 minutes again and shoot as many cops as possible. Bad thing is, the shootings are not really spectacular. Graphics are kinda boring and dusty, gameplay is ultra 08 / 15.

All in all, I am really dissappointed with that game.
It starts very promissing, you try to get into the story, but after a minute, all you have to do is shoot shoot shoot and forget about anything else. Wow, sometimes you have to reset the saw, lol.
I would N O T recommend it to buy, unless you want uninspired 08/15 shooting, but in that genre, there are 100 games out there who make it betther.… Expand

Graphics look decent but the lack of realism is very irritating. You rob banks but when you shoot a civilian you get punished with extra time. Kinda strange, armed robbers with high ethical standards. Compared to the numerous better games out there, BF3, Shogun and even oldies like GTA and mass effect not really worth your money.

The floaty controls absolutely break this game. It does not flow and the enemies are either brain dead or extremely smart. The unlock system is pretty lame and not up to par with current games. THere is no introduction or anything to tell you how to play the game either, google is used for that. The game is somewhat cheap, but you only get a few missions available to play and that coupled with the broken gameplay is just a huge deal breaker for me.… Expand

I picked up this game because it was billed as the same kind of game as Left 4 Dead, a game I highly enjoy. To be fair, it is just like Left 4 Dead. Just as a blatant rip off with no improvement or adaption.

See, in Left 4 Dead you have objectives to survive in a linear level and occasionally you have to fight off hordes of zombies while watching out for special zombies that can make your day even worse. If you get incapacitated you hope your teammates can pick you up further down and you get to rejoin the fun.

In Payday, you have objectives to survive in a linear level and occasionally you have to fight off hordes of police while watching out for special police that can make your day even worse. If you get incapacitated you hope your teammates can trade a hostage further down and you get to rejoin the fun.

If it seems I cut and paste that last paragraph, no worries, that is exactly what the developers did for the game mechanics. Instead of having zombies, you have brain dead hordes of police to gun down. Well done aptly named Overkill Software. Occasionally you have to deal with special police forces such as the martial arts 'smoker' or the one hit wonder 'bulldozer'. These are the police equivalents of the 'hunter' and 'tank' zombies respectably.

There is a problem here though. First off, as you would imagine, everyone has a gun.So the developers put in a 'recovering shield' system on top of a normal health point pool. This makes it a cover game. The problem of this is that in a cover game usually you then have the ability to lean out of cover, usually considered a standard feature. It is sorely missing from this game however, which forces you and your teammates to leave cover.

This brings me to the next problem. Every cop is a marksman in automatic fire, uses automatic weapons, and is perfectly willing to shoot up a room to kill you. While that might tie into real life where police need to be proficient marksman, you however as the crook seem to have higher morals then the police since you get heavy penalties if you so much as graze a civilian. Said civilians loving to jump up and run into the line of fire. I felt as a criminal more of the protector of these poor AI imbeciles having to constantly tell them to stay down so that my teammates, the police, or myself didn't accidentally shoot them. Add onto this the police's ability to shoot at you from across the map without fail and no good way to tell where the fire is coming from.

Speaking of AI imbeciles, don't even bother trying to play this game by yourself. Just like in Left 4 Dead you will have to do all the objectives yourself. But considering all the AI has to do in a zombie game is just shoot the zombies, having basic AI can be forgiven. In Payday you need to do things like set up drills that will constantly jam. This forces you to run over and spend several seconds unjamming it so it can finish up the five minute countdown before you get to the next objective. This SHOULD have been something you could tell either an AI or human player to do, or just have the AI do automatically. But it doesn't which gives a solo player more of a workload besides being the only human player in a town with more cops then a police state apparently.

Overall, this could have been an interesting game. Had the AI for everyone been better, the objectives not tedious, the slew of reality flaws, and it not being a blatant rip off of another game just with guns this game could have been good. But it is only a year and some months old and it feels even more dated then that. Save your $20 and the $10 for the dlc and buy something else, like maybe the better Left 4 Dead. If there was a way to get money back from steam for this, I would.… Expand