Broken Controllers: Ramblin'

    We're talking about the best part of the work week. Exactly: we're talking about Payday 2. Get your mask on and follow the jump.

    Payday 2 is a first person shooter with a blend between stealthily setting up the perfect bank heist and shooting your way clear when that same heist goes south. This is a very regular event as even bumping into a guard sets off their criminal senses. This can easily be explained: bumping into them causes the assault rifle you have jammed down your suit pant to tip them off.

    The game takes place in two separate modes. The first is casing mode where you can't really do anything but walk around and see where things are. A skill will let a player pinpoint guards and cameras but without it you are left to hope to remember and not run into anybody. Once you feel as though you are ready to make your move, you put your mask on and this brings up the standard shooter fare and controls. You can sprint, jump, crouch and, most importantly, shoot.

    Gunplay in the game is fairly standard. You point at what you want dead and click the mouse, often holding it down until it stays down. It's hard to talk about a shooter given that the gameplay is generally standardized and most people know how it plays. Generally, you carry two weapons and have whatever recovering armor you brought with you. Weapons can be modified to change their characteristics: from their damage to the concealment, or how quickly you are spotted when in casing mode or just sneaking around. Heavier weaponry and armor gets you noticed faster, which, personally, causes me all sorts of grief. Your health and armor actually operate in a similar method to the first Halo game. Your armor will recharge but your health doesn't without the use of a health pack. Run out of health and you go down and have about a half minute for a teammate to reach you and help you up. Failing this, you are out of action until you can respawn after a timer runs out or can be brought back by having a teammate exchange a hostage for you. The latter option doesn't exist for single player. Get knocked down four times, excluding cloaker downs, and you are out just like if you hadn't been helped up in time.

    The "stealth" mode of the game varies between sneaking into warehouses and grabbing all the loot and running fully armed into a crowded store and intimidating the customers into not calling the cops.  While a successful copless run is always a good feeling (since it's fairly hard to do), when you're doing the stealth portion well, there's not a whole lot to do.  Usually, you'll have a couple of drills running, or one person will be running loot out to a drop point while someone babysits the hostages.  One mission involves breaking into up to 120 deposit boxes in a bank, which takes 40 minutes of holding the 'F' key if no one has upgraded lock picking.  Still fun, but very time consuming.

    Next up, I want to talk about your levels and skills. As you complete missions you gain two resources: money and, more importantly, experience. Experience unlocks additional skills in whatever tree you are looking to run down. There are four trees: Mastermind, Enforcer, Technician, and Ghost. For those wondering, I'm an Enforcer and Technician. This mixing raises an interesting point: you aren't locked into any given tree and can bounce around each one and get whatever skills you want. However to get the most out of your skills, it is better to focus on one tree and get the higher level skills. For example, as a high level enforcer I can use the best armor in the game while my two accomplices, Tyler and everyone's favorite guestish host Ed, can't. Each tree has a different focus.

• Ghost is all about movement and avoiding detection. 
• Mastermind is about controlling NPCs and assisting players. 
• Technicican is all about opening things that the other people don't want you to open. 
• Enforcer is about being the team's tank. 

    Given its inspiration from Left 4 dead and its sequel, there are special cops that show up and make your life difficult. This is actually a completely needed balancing system as normal cops hardly slow you down unless you are caught in the open with no armor. I can currently pull normal, no skull jobs, on the difficulty rating of 0-4 skulls, without having to even worry about going down because of how tough my armor is. So, here they are in order from least to most dangerous. Now, this is my list and other people may disagree with how I've ranked them, but let's run them down and let you choose.

1. The Sniper: Big shock: he snipes and does lots of damage. He's not that dangerous because you are usually in a covered and, therefore, safe area.
2. The Taser: A close range threat, his purpose is to immobilize you. He can be dangerous, but since you are usually looking at him and still shooting spasmodically, he can be killed while tasing you.
3. The Shield: There are ways to make this guy really simple (penetrating rifles or explosive shotgun rounds), but he can be dangerous if he holds up in a choke point.
4. The Bulldozer: Now here's where things are personal. These guys are really slow and have more health than anything else in the game. Therefore, they usually have to be killed with headshots. They are extremely dangerous, but not able to deal a one hit kill outside of 4 skulls.
5. The Cloaker, or to use its official name, the @%&ing Cloaker: This guy is a one hit down if he connects, and he usually does. If spotted at range he can be taken out easily, but if he closes you are in trouble. Given that his usual M.O. is to wait around a corner or under a car while you're lugging a bag, that happens fairly often. While both me and Tyler have gone on Podcast and stated how much we hate this guy, I think we both actually kinda like having this guy running around. He is a serious danger even to fully equipped crews and he makes the team aspect of going loud much more apparent. 

    While I have to say the game is great just to sit down and play because its combat system is well honed, it just lacks something without at least one other human player.  For reference, see every single episode of the podcast where we've played a multiplayer game. I haven't played with random scrubs online, but I'm antisocial and this is a game that takes a lot of inherent teamwork. I've had fun with Tyler in this game, being my fully loaded self sitting on a bunch of cameras while he ninjas a place. This is because we each know what we are good at. I lack the patience and the skills to pull the sneaky stuff and the more people you have trying to sneak around the more likely someone is going to get caught. So I instead run my armor and heavy equipment in case Tyler gets caught. That said, the game is structured that even should you be caught you have a chance to fight your way to completion. Often, you'll have low armor (for the low detection risk) but you still have your main gun which lets you actually fight back against the hordes of cops. That is why I think the game did its thing perfectly: pulling a mission without the cops getting called is a great feeling, but should they be brought in you still have a chance.

    The missions, unfortunately, don't have a whole lot of variation. There are experience modifiers that build up by not playing a given mission for a while and encourage replaying them while similar negative modifiers make sure you don't spam the same level over and over again. That said, the missions do suffer from the AI. Without a teammate you are the only one who can even interact with the objectives as the AI can't even be ordered to carry bags. This is a small quibble but can occasionally be frustrating as can the AI's occasional moments of their brain falling out and watching them dither on the top floor of a building because they don't know how to navigate the map properly while a Cloaker takes you out of the game and negates all your hard work till that point. The last thing that drives me kind of nuts about the game is the only way to gain unlocks for your equipment you have to get lucky and pull the correct card at the draw and the end of the level and hope you got the right weapon mod.

    The problems with the game do not outweigh the good parts. And while I am probably not the perfect person to say this, since I got my copy from Ed for free, I would say the game is more than worth the money and it just gets better when you play with friends to share in the pain and the success of each heist.

    All right ramblers lets get rambling!

                                    Zach out.