From the city street shootouts of Heat to the creepy clown masks found in The Dark Knight’s opening moments, there’s something alarmingly alluring about the Hollywood bank heist fantasy. Fortunately, the excellent Payday series has been letting me live it out for myself for more than a decade without needing to establish a rap sheet. The next chapter in this long-running burglary simulator, Payday 3, has finally been released from custody, and though it continues the series’ tradition of delivering one of the best digital smash and grab experiences out there, the usual horrible Payday bugs, a dinky pool of jobs to tackle, and a predictably weak story mean it’s not exactly the giant leap forward I was hoping for. Still, if Payday 2’s post-launch support is any indication, this is at least a very promising start for what could become another decade of happily pistol whipping cashiers and fixing drills.
Like its predecessor, Payday 3 is a cooperative multiplayer FPS where you and three friends take on increasingly elaborate heists. The extremely thin story focuses on the same motley crew of criminals as they’re forced out of retirement by a secretive cabal of shadowy and generic silhouettes. All your favorite entrepreneurial personalities are back, including Hoxton, the chain smoking mastermind, and Chains, the always hilarious military man. Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the story itself is just a sequence of slides with voiceover justifying the string of jobs you’ll undertake with precious little to tie them together. There’s even a mission where you work with Ice-T… for some reason? (And yes, I do mean that Ice-T from all 500,000 episodes of Law & Order.) Payday does love a good cameo, and though it definitely makes for an entertaining little encounter, it didn’t exactly do much to draw me into an already barebones tale. But even if the story never really takes off, it does do a good job at setting the stage while hinting at what that future might bring.
Within seconds of beginning my first robbery at the obligatory “local bank branch” intro level, the movement and gunplay already felt enormously upgraded. You move faster overall and can do more modern maneuvers like sliding, which I found useful in combat as well as for stealth. Weapons feel more punchy and satisfying, even if they are burdened with hopelessly small magazines and long reload times before you’ve spent some of your ill-gotten cash on upgrades. You can even use civilian hostages as a meat shield now, forcing enemies to engage you in melee to avoid hurting an innocent soul, which is a nice touch. After years of incremental updates to Payday 2, Payday 3 immediately feels like a proper sequel in the gameplay department, even if the formula of breaking into vaults and throwing bags of cash into an unmarked van remains identical.
The weapon selection isn’t nearly as strong as Payday 2’s roster, with just 30 to pick from instead of more than one hundred, but the options available at present cover all the bases. You’ve got everything from deadly and accurate rifles to silenced pistols, and there’s a good mix of stealth focused gadgets and tools too, like throwing daggers that are perfect for sneaky tryhards, and devious jammers that can gunk up enemy comms. Weapons can also be customized with mods and attachments that significantly alter how they are used, like putting a scope on a weapon to increase its range, or adding a silencer to a giant rifle to make it an option during stealth runs.
Payday 3 also raises the bar with the quality of its misadventures, as the vast majority of the eight available jobs are super well-designed. Many feel like instant classics, like the art museum heist, Under The Surphaze, with its delicate puzzles and labyrinthine halls hiding priceless art to be pilfered, or the fantastic Gold & Shark bank heist that throws you into the most elaborate old fashioned vault break-in yet. Developer Starbreeze has definitely upped its game in terms of variety and quality with these base stages, and I found myself immediately repeating a completed job more often than not, just to practice my strategies and explore other possible outcomes. That said, there are still some weaker levels, like Road Rage, which is a combat-focused mission that has you guiding an armored van on a bridge with very little room for deploying different strategies and no stealth option whatsoever. Thankfully, that was the only one of the eight that was especially weak, and the highs of the good ones far outshine the lows of the less interesting choices.
While almost all of the new heists are great, it is a bit disappointing that there are so few of them after such a long wait. Presumably that library will expand dramatically over time, just like the previous entry did, but after just five hours I’d already completed all the available jobs and had begun the endless grind of repeating those same gigs over and over again. The saving grace there is that repeating these missions is a lot less monotonous thanks to the variety granted by added stealth options that make most jobs feel like two separate levels in one thanks to how differently they play from run and gun playthroughs.
In many ways the changes to Payday’s stealth mechanics are even more significant than any improvements to movement or combat. Only the most committed and elite players stood a chance of pulling off a totally clean heist in Payday 2, and proper leveling was basically a requirement in order to unlock things like a silent drill to get through vaults before making an attempt was even remotely viable. In contrast, Payday 3 provides new mechanics to support stealth right away, like the ability to pickpocket security guards to relieve them of their keycards, or use environmental objects to lure them away. That means pulling off a clandestine operation here is almost immediately achievable, even with a randomly matchmade group of players only loosely communicating with one another via text chat.
That’s also largely owing to the clever and fantastic way its missions are designed, in which stealth runs are now given a completely different route to success. For example, the Secure Capital Bank level normally requires players to go the humdrum path of using thermite to burn through the top of the bank vault then dive in from the floor above before making off with the loot, but this series of objectives smartly only triggers as your primary path once players have been caught. Before that, your crew can take the much more complex and rewarding route of breaking into various parts of the bank to sabotage electrical systems and deactivate security measures to gain access to the vault without anyone being the wiser, which is essentially an entirely different mission if you can pull it off. In Payday 2, that same kind of bank heist required players to follow more or less the exact same path of drilling through the vault no matter your preferred tactic, and to do it stealthily you just had to not get caught.
But all those new options don’t mean pulling off a stealth run is going to be easy, and that’s thanks to enhanced enemy AI across the board. Guards now respond to your actions, breaking free of their usual patrol routes to investigate suspicious activity and doing a whole lot more than drawing their gun and shooting you when you’re spotted. For example, if you’re found in a private but not entirely suspicious area, like the back office at a bank vs. the vault, instead of immediately trying to kill you, they’ll simply escort you to a public area and give you a good tongue lashing, which can be used by cunning players to remove guards from their posts temporarily. That smarter AI extends to combat as well, where the police do a great job of swarming you from all sides instead of standing around as target practice. They can also respond to your actions and try to obstruct your heist, like how they’ll pull the fire alarm when you’ve lit up that thermite, using the sprinkler system to delay your fire’s progress. Likewise, hostages are now much more responsive to your commands and easier to boss around and control as you use them as collateral in combat or negotiation.