Payday 3 Review in Progress – Open Beta Impressions

ign.com:

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 more than a decade without needing to establish a rap sheet of my own. The next chapter in this long-running burglary simulator, Payday 3, recently concluded its open beta before we all get to filch the final version later this month – and though this early look was only a limited snapshot of what’s to come, it already feels like a significant step up from the lawbreaking of Payday 2. After twelve hours of smashing and grabbing, I’ve got a whole lot more left to see in the full game, but so far I’m very excited to come out of retirement and continue my life of crime.

Like its predecessor, Payday 3 is a cooperative multiplayer FPS where you and three friends take on increasingly elaborate heists. But within seconds of beginning my first run of the introductory bank robbery (the beta’s only available level), the movement and gunplay already felt enormously upgraded. You move faster overall and can now 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 do have 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 meat shields now, forcing enemies to engage you in melee to avoid hurting innocent soul, which is a nice touch. After years of incremental updates to Payday 2, Payday 3 immediately feels like a proper sequel, even if the formula of breaking into vaults and throwing