First Experiences playing Payday: The Heist

One of aabicus’s favourite games is Payday: The Heist. He’s been pestering me for a while to get it and play it, and finally, one month later, in a spur of the moment thing, I find myself abruptly thrown into my first heist. While aabicus is streaming. Cue me asking lots of questions.

But really, apart from asking what’s going on, Payday: The Heist is a lot, lot simpler than the sequel. All you do is choose weapons, a bag, a perk and some cosmetic stuff. Then you start the game and go on a big heist.

Our first heist was Panic Room. Something about a drug deal or something, but we blew up a ceiling and got a helicopter with a giant magnet to carry a large safe away. Then we escaped via the basement. I survived most of the heist on about 20 health, thanks to the regenerating shields that appear as a white outline around your character.

I really, really prefer Payday: The Heist over Payday 2. It’s not just because it’s simpler, but as a brand new character, I still have some use. My two starter guns aren’t inaccurate as hell. I’m not missing out on hundreds of perks and armour buffs and all sorts that higher level players might have. Aabicus is Reputation (level) 193, I started off as level 1 and got to level 5, and I was still holding my own. When I did the Jewellery Heist and the Meth Lab thing in Payday 2 with Kettlecamper, I felt completely useless. Everything I could do to help, including shooting people, everyone else could do better because they had a billion perks and a ton of DLCs and stuff. Here in Panic Room though, I helped aabicus get up off the floor, I covered the exists and only fell down twice, and one of those times was my own fault because I didn’t know we were using C4 to blow up a door and I walked into said about-to-be-blown-up door. Still didn’t really know what was going on, but I worked it out eventually.

Oh and there’s sprinting. I didn’t know I could sprint until we did First World Bank, the second heist I played and I pressed Shift instead of Ctrl while trying to crouch. I’d love the ability to sprint in L4D2. Now that I had gotten the hang of the basic controls, First World Bank went much more smoothly. I helped fill up bags of money and nearly died because I accidentally deployed an ammo bag instead of meleeing a cop in the face.

I think the only thing I didn’t like was the lack of voice lines, I heard a lot of them being repeated. Also snipers are a pain in the backside and very, very hard to kill with the starting weapons. But that’s about it. The default key binds are a bit weird (voice chat is bound to ` by default) but those are easily changed.

Of course, I failed to record it, because I didn’t have enough time and OBS wasn’t playing nice. Oh well. Hopefully, next time I play and once I’ve leveled up a bit (and recorded it), I’ll be able to give you a more detailed opinion.

In case anyone’s wondering, here are my stats after two heists:

Overall, I’d definitely recommend this over Payday 2. Even the DLCs are better.