An Overlooked Gem... PAYDAY: The Heist

Skyrim, Uncharted 3, Arkham City, Modern Battleguys 3... the last few months of 2011 saw some extremely big games released, resulting in some lesser-known titles being swept under the rug. Released in October, just before the aforementioned heavy hitters, PAYDAY: The Heist has been quietly chugging along on Steam and PSN.

With only a couple dozen staff, indie developer Overkill has created something incredibly fun, polished and unique. PAYDAY is a first-person shooter in which four heavily-armed crooks commit elaborate robberies while fighting off hordes of law enforcement. In the spirit of Left 4 Dead, enemies are randomly spawned, making each game a dynamic challenge.

Everybody, Down on the Floor!
Here's a brief rundown of First World Bank, the game's most popular heist. After entering the bank, someone locates the manager, taking a key card that gives access to a room with a hidden stash of tools, while the others secure hostages, kill security cameras and subdue guards. You must then set up a drill that opens a gate to the back of the bank and use a computer to delete the bank's security camera footage.

The police soon arrive and send in hostage rescuers. You must hold off the rapidly escalating assault, while making sure the drill doesn't get jammed. Upon breaking through, you further secure the area and set up thermite to burn a hole down through the vault ceiling. After fighting off angry waves of SWATs, you hop down into the compromised vault to grab the huge piles of cash and gain a final set of escape objectives.

Though the overall script for a heist stays mostly the same from game to game, incidental occurrences like enemy spawns and NPC locations can change dramatically, keeping the maps fresh after many playthroughs. The higher difficulties are intended for specifically higher level players, not only because the assaults are much more punishing, but because lowbies are very badly equipped to handle prolonged heavy combat.

You Gained a Level... and a Badass Shotgun
PAYDAY incentivizes longterm play with a leveling system that unlocks new weapons, tools and perks. It's hugely satisfying to watch your arsenal expand and see your favorite guns slowly evolve into tricked out super weapons. The different perks affect a player's teammates by giving them extra health, better aim, faster reloads, etc, but their presence doesn't seem overpowered, more like small nudges in performance.

With an eventual selection of assault rifles, shotguns and machine guns, there isn't a specific "perfect" loadout, and PAYDAY keeps it simple with no weapons having excessively similar qualities. The aforementioned tools are basic things like droppable ammo and health bags, extra hostage ties or proximity mines. On higher difficulties, it feels necessary to bring only health and ammo bags, making the other options seem like unintentional red herrings.

Some things you won't find in PAYDAY: grenades and flashbangs, tactical flashlights, the ability to lay flat on the ground, weapons with greatly zoomed scopes, a command ring for bots, character class specializations, scout drones or quick time events. Everything is kept relatively simple compared to the glut of military style shooters currently on the market. This is a benefit both in regards to keeping the action very straightforward and maximizing a team's reliance on acting as a team. You aren't playing as four commandoes, but four guys who need each other's help.


Fighting the Good Fight
There are some obvious tactics that distinctly separate the good players from the bad. Examples... once a supply bag is dropped, it is unmovable. A good player drops a bag where everyone can partake without getting shot, while a bad player drops it in a heavy fire zone. A good player stays close to his teammates, watching their backs and helping with objectives. A bad player will often be seen alone in the distance trying to shoot everything in sight and subsequently getting surrounded, gunned down or incapacitated by a special unit.

The specials, Cloakers, Shields, Bulldozers and Tazers, can be killed solo, but are potentially dangerous enough that a single special can take down multiple careless players. Cloakers are the Sam Fisher ninjas of the game, wall running to avoid your gunfire and downing players with a single melee attack. Shields use a large metal shield to deflect any frontal attacks and must be flanked to be shot. Bulldozers use heavy armor and powerful shotguns, with a small faceplate being their only weak spot. Tazers use a long range tazer attack that causes the victim to involuntarily fire their gun before knocking them out.

The Good Stuff
Depending on sales, PAYDAY generally costs between $10 and $20, which is a steal when you see many dedicated players investing 100+ hours into the game. Despite there currently being only six campaigns, the replayability of the game is huge. An upcoming DLC will add new campaigns and weapons, as well as raise the level cap. Lastly, PAYDAY is the rare game that looks beautiful on PC but doesn't require a super computer to run it.

It cannot be emphasized enough that when the player has good teammates and you support each other through a ruthless bitch of an assault, the feeling of accomplishment and camaraderie is awesome. The action can surprise you with how intensely aggressive it suddenly becomes, and this is greatly enhanced by composer Simon Viklund's excellent musical score, which stays at a lower tempo during down times and then ramps up with the action.

Possibly one of PAYDAY's greatest features is the accessibility of its developer, Overkill. Using the Steam User forums as their primary forum, the developers literally interact with members of the community on a daily basis, weighing in on suggestions and offering tidbits of information on upcoming changes and DLC. This level of care is hugely gratifying and enables players to feel as though they're actively helping to refine the game over time.

The Bad Stuff
A few issues can mar the PAYDAY experience a bit. Joining an ongoing game reveals a major design hiccup in that when a new player enters a game, everything pauses for about 30 seconds. When this happens once, it's a little annoying. When it happens three or four times because players keep joining and leaving, it can utterly kill the momentum of a game.

Although the leveling system and difficulty settings offer a satisfying set of ramping challenges and rewards, they also serve to dilute the already somewhat small community into even smaller groups. Especially during off-times, this can result in a lack of available players or a group with wildly varying levels of experience. Waiting sometimes five or more minutes for a group is bad, but mixing hardcore veterans with newbies can be frustrating as well.

Some players bemoan the lack of a player versus player mode, but PAYDAY is actually better off without it, at least as the game stands now. If players could control the special law enforcement units, a well-coordinated group would go through the crooks as if they were wet tissue. Besides, the heart of the game is committing heists and tactically responding to resistance rather than killing everything that moves. A proper PAYDAY pvp match would involve something like dueling heists.

The Bottom Line
PAYDAY: The Heist offers some extremely satisfying shooter combat coupled with lively and unique mission structure. The action is fast, brutal and above all, fair. When you fail a mission, it almost never feels like you were dealt a bad hand so much as your team just played it poorly. As noted above, there is an upcoming and highly anticipated DLC pack that will add a significant amount of additional content, adding even more replay value to an already amazing game. It cannot be stressed enough. Buy. This. Game.

Resident evil 6 Trailer Reactions

A few observations and random thoughts...

Leon appears to be giving quivery-lipped orders to a zombified Mr. President, as if it would somehow un-zombie him. You'd think he'd be above such stupidly naive (and dramatically cliched) behavior by now.

There is very little gameplay on display here which, though I understand that modern game trailers are frequently very cinematic, I find a little worrisome.

It feels like they're trying specifically to invoke the peak of the series' popularity, Resident Evil 4, by returning to Leon, who also starred in their recent (and somewhat terrible) CGI movie. Yes, Claire was in that too, but she spent most of the movie either mothering an annoying kid or getting injured and acting as gimped technical support.

The voice acting sounds a million times better than any other Capcom game I can remember. Someone at Capcom finally understands that this matters, perhaps?.

I can't get a sense from the video of whether Leon is still moving using tank controls, though it appears he's probably still using a lot of quick time events to fight hand to hand. If Leon is still using tank controls though, I think we can say that Japanese developers are officially beyond helping.

The ability for modern game graphics to pretty much look as good as their pre-rendered cutscenes makes for some much more seamless storytelling, though if players end up watching more of the action than doing it, they'll get pretty quickly pissed off at this, I think.

The uncanny valley effect is much harder to spot when you only see it in three-second long or less bursts of random imagery.

These days it feels like hardcore Western fans of Japanese game design are some of the biggest apologists in the gaming community. If this turns out to be somewhat of a polished turd, as Resident Evil 5 was, they will flock to defend it in droves.

Uncharted 3: Not the Game of the Year

It's been a couple of weeks since Eurogamer's review-heard-round-the-world of Uncharted 3 was published, and the gaming community has already moved on. In short, reviewer Simon Parkin gave Naughty Dog's latest entry in the Nathan Drake trilogy an 8/10 score, sending emotionally fragile gamers everywhere into unspeakable fits of rage.

Much of the outcry was born of the simple, if somewhat hyperbolic, premise that the 8/10 was awarded in an attempt at reviewer bravado, a thumbing of Eurogamer's nose to the game journalism community at large. Who then can say that Eurogamer panders to any publisher when they give such an obviously perfect game a less than perfect score?

This is paranoid nonsense. The real issue is not that the score was wrong, but rather the criticisms used to defend the score were poorly conceived.

Parkin: "Uncharted 3 is a game that has an unshakable sense of its own identity. The series has always had clear aims: an unapologetically mainstream Boy's Own romp whose primary interest is in creating unrivaled thrills through daring spectacle rather than daring design."

Though stating early on that the series is well known for its cinematic linearity, Parkin proceeds to complain for several paragraphs about Uncharted 3's linearity. At one point he says he almost felt his participation in the action was a hindrance to presentation of the scripted action because of his inability to play outside the lines. He dismisses the single player experience as having zero replayability except in regards to finding the remaining hidden treasures missed on the first play through.

In short, one does not realistically criticize a cinematic adventure game for lacking laissez-faire sandbox play, just as one does not criticize a NASCAR racing sim for its lack of good storytelling. Parkin presumably went into this review with eyes open. I'm assuming (possibly wrongly) he's played other Uncharted games and knows not to expect the next Elder Scrolls.

Given that Uncharted 3 is what it is, maybe Parkin scored it too high in accordance with his own enjoyment of it. I'm assuming again that he has watched a film or two during his lifetime, and perhaps even owns a DVD of a film he enjoyed very much. In the same way that one enjoys a good movie again, is it not possible to enjoy a good linear game again? No matter how scripted Uncharted 3 may be, the many shootouts of the game have the potential to surprise even a veteran player when things start going really crazy.

Despite being relatively misguided in how he approached his criticism of the game, Parkin was correct in that Uncharted 3 is not perfect. The action is wonderful to behold. The story is compelling despite treading some very familiar territory. The characterization makes most other games attempts to achieve the same depth appear childish and empty.

However!

There are some serious problems with how this game controls, and it unavoidably results in many, many player deaths that should not happen. Perhaps it's a result of too few buttons on which to map out controls, but Uncharted 3 clearly has too few buttons doing too many things.

Introduced in the third game, Nate can now grab opponents and shove them away, adding a tiny bit of complexity to the otherwise super simple melee combat. The same button you use for shoving though, is also used to do a ground roll and to take cover. The roll is the only way for you to stay alive out of cover because it dodges gunfire and makes snipers lose their bead on you, but when running around, you will often accidentally take cover in the open when you only meant to roll.

With this button also serving as your shove, it is almost impossible for Nate to survive many close encounters. You notice one or more guys flanking your cover, forcing you to run into the open to get away. This allows the ever-present snipers to target you. However, if you get near any bad guys, your only means of dodging sniper attacks disappears as you get into a lengthy shoving match, during which a sniper shoots you dead.

Another way enemies flush Nate out of cover is to constantly throw grenades. If close enough and fast enough, the player can grab live grenades and toss them back. Of course, this is done with another shared button, the pick-stuff-up or manipulate-stuff button. One thing you will notice during every firefight is that there is a new weapon every 15 feet or so, scattered around the various bits of cover.

It's frustratingly common that you'll have a live grenade directly under you that you absolutely cannot pick up because you keep swapping guns from the pile of random weapons around you. And the bad guys must have bought their grenades in bulk at Costco because you will have to dodge approximately one million of them over the course of the game.

The final problem, and it is a doozy, relates to aiming your guns, something you need to do a lot. In an ill-conceived attempt to help players hit distant or moving enemies, Uncharted 3's aiming reticule greatly slows in speed when moving over an enemy hitbox. Unfortunately, it dips to the same agonizingly slow speed even when an enemy is right in your face. This means that at a distance, the reticule can easily follow bad guys as they run from cover to cover, but when they get close, it's like trying to swat flies with a sledgehammer, impossibly slow and imprecise.

Naughty Dog has already said they're examining the aiming system and will try to address issues via a patch, but this is neither a guarantee that they will do it nor that they'll get it right. From the perspective of having played Uncharted 3 before this possible patch has been applied though, I must clearly state that the game presently has some mildly broken qualities.

Because of this, I too would have given the game an 8/10, but that doesn't mean I don't enthusiastically recommend it anyways. It's a genuinely thrilling game to experience and I'm very much looking forward to my second go at it.

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