T w e n t y S i d e d

Payday was on sale recently, and I’ve been wondering what it was all about. Rutskarn and Jibar (more commonly known by their hip-hop street names: Skarn and J-Bar) played through the game, and it told me everything I needed to know:

Hilarious to watch. Probably less so to actually play.

So the pitch seems to be something along the lines of “Left 4 Dead styled dynamic gameplay” mixed with “Kane & Lynch styled ugliness, awfulness, and childishness.)

1. No attempt to make your in-game goals follow any kind of logic. Don’t even get me started on the part where you painstakingly escort a horribly burned man through a downpour of gunfire by pointing a GUN at him because you have no way of getting the briefcase handcuffed to his non-bulletproof hand.
2. The characters are generic clown-faced idiot men. Is your favorite L4D character Francis? Or perhaps Bill? Maybe you appreciate the chance to play as your own gender with Zoe? Pfft. Screw that. Do you want to be clown-faced guy #1 or clown-faced guy #2? Even stranger that they actually did create four characters, but made three of them brown-haired white men, and one of them a black man. And then hid all their faces behind masks so you can’t tell who is who in the heat of battle. WHYYYY!?!?
3. Gameplay that doesn’t seem to require or even encourage organization and teamwork. Try playing L4D like this and see how far you get.
4. Dull foes that border on the offensive. I’m not sure what my threshold for number of police officer widows I want to create in a single game session, but I would say it’s probably less than this. It would help if there was more variety among your foes. Guys with bullet-proof riot shields that can slowly creep closer and closer until you headshot them. Guys with automatic weapons and minimal armor who sprint at you. Throw in an APC with a turret that’s almost impossible to destroy but has limited ammo. Guys rappelling from rooftops. Tear gas. Give the cops some San-Andreas styled combat taunts that show them to be ridiculously overbearing and corrupt tough guys so we can mow them down without needing to be emotionally numb first.
5. No levity, no personality. A bit of Tarantino-style dialog would have transformed this from an ugly macho slog to a witty, subversive adventure. As it is, you’re just playing boring incompetent jerks who murder hundreds of people because they can’t think clearly.

Underneath the stupidity and primate grunting is a brilliant game, crying to get out.

As I said, I haven’t played it. Maybe it’s pure wacky fun when you’re in the driver’s seat. I remain skeptical.

EDIT: So it sounds like a lot of the different police types I mentioned are actually in the game. That’s good to hear. Still, it FEELS like a march of same-y foes. I’m not sure if they need the specials to show up more often, if they just need a more striking profile, or if Rutskarn needs to go easy on the methamphetamine before they record.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.