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Payday: The Heist
OverKill and Sony Online brought a new Payday: The Heist level to Gamescom this year. I played it with an OverKill developer at the show, and was impressed all over again with the co-op shooter’s mechanics and style. Read on to find out how different two of this downloadable game’s levels can be.
Unlike the bank heist, which requires players to go in shooting to make any progress past the lobby, this heist starts out with guns drawn. We’re trying to lift the diamonds out of a rich guy’s skyscraper vault, and the level begins with us having infiltrated almost to the top of the tower. There are patrolling guards to be avoided (a task made significantly easier by marking them with the F key, which highlights them for your whole team for a minute or two) while trying to hack three total consoles across two floors of this posh office. If you screw it up and get spotted like we did, you still have to accomplish the hacks – just now you have dudes shooting at you while doing so.
The hacking devices you place on the consoles take a few minutes total to finish their jobs. They’ll occasionally get jammed and need a manual reboot, though, so once you’re spotted you have to combine the running firefights with guards with fixing the stupid electronics. The five seconds it takes to reboot a machine makes you extremely vulnerable, though, so you have to work together.
At this point, the mission can go one of two ways. The hack might work, and you’ll get the codes you need to get into the vault. If it fails, you’ll have to go up to the party upstairs and kidnap a VIP who can tell you – which he may or may not do, depending on how your enhanced interrogation aboard the getaway helicopter goes. If he doesn’t, you’ll track down the owner’s son, who should be easier to convince to give up the goods. There are other branches as well, like a bonus item that may or may not spawn in the vault itself and complicates the mission if you choose to grab it.
OverKill hopes that these random variations on heists will keep Payday fresh enough to make it more than worth its $20 price point. I’ve had a blast with the game both this morning in Germany and at E3 a few months ago, though, so I’m not terribly worried on that score.
Payday: The Heist comes out on PC and PS3 for $20 on October 4.
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