by: Michael Barnes

Payday: The Heist might appear to be a first-person shooter with a theme straight out of a great heist picture like Michael Mann’s Heat, but it’s more of a tragedy than a crime drama. The concept is a million-dollar elevator pitch. It’s Left 4 Dead style four player co-op shooter but instead of getting behind the eyes and hands of zombie apocalypse survivors, you put on a grotesque clown mask and slip on some latex gloves to get down to the business of being a professional stick-up man with three accomplices.

Much like Valve’s beloved, episodic slog through hordes of undead, Payday has a compartmentalized structure with six different heists each playing out as a connected narrative. Unfortunately, the hordes of law enforcement officers that attempt to thwart you are much dumber than the average gut muncher, and that’s the least of this game’s rather egregious disappointments.

The first scenario starts off well enough, with you and your team (preferably managed by friends or others you are in close communication with) waltz into a bank and proceed to knock it over. Civilians duck for cover, and you can motion for them to hit the deck, zip tie their hands to keep them from getting away- you might need to exchange them to respawn a downed ally. First you’ve got to get an industrial drill smuggled into the bank in a copy machine upstairs. Then you’ve got to break the lock on the vault with it, which means you’ve got to babysit it while a progress bar fills up, and the damn thing breaks down every couple of seconds. While you’re playing handyman, the cops show up en masse, so it’s all going down in a tremendous shoot-out. With the vault compromised, you’ve then got to burn through the roof of it to get inside, stuff the money in duffle bags, and get out.

It sounds awesome, doesn’t it? And on paper, it absolutely is because it’s a thrilling, interesting, and hugely cinematic setup and it describes action and detail that isn’t very common in video games. They even got the music right. It’s a tensely throbbing, understated patter that tends to accompany such scenes at the movies. The other heists, which include stealing an entire panic room out of an urban meth lab, extracting a prisoner from a prison transport convoy on a bridge, and engaging in a running gun battle in the streets to catch your backstabbing wheelman are also well-conceived and will have you thinking “this is going to be bad ass”.

But it doesn’t take long to realize that the concept and the execution simply do not match up and the results are more “ass” than “bad ass”. As ambitious as the game is in terms of its setting, the game design and engine are a dismal failure at communicating it effectively. On the surface, the game looks very old, by as much as a decade. Animation is stiff, choppy, and the framerate is terribly unstable. There’s a distinct lack of polish to it all, and when you’re watching a giant cloud billowing through the doors of the bank created by a smoke grenade, you can’t help but think “this should be awesome”. But it isn’t, because the visuals are simply too crude, too clunky.

Crudeness also extends to the controls, which feel sloppy and clearly unoptimized for a control pad, at least on the PS3. The shooting is terrible, among the worst I’ve seen in years. Guns lack impact, sound terrible, and hit detection is all over the place. I seriously think there’s better gunplay in the ancient Rise of the Triad. Completely incompetent, nonsensical enemy AI doesn’t help and it’s pretty clear that Overkill felt that the challenge was in swamping the players with never-ending swarms of cops literally pouring over the walls (much like zombies) than in having intelligently reacting adversaries. You can treat these guys just like zombies—running up and pistol-whipping them works about as well as shooting them, sometimes better.