Payday 2 2013

Is it still worth playing?

A crew of up to four robbers takes contracts around Washington, D.C., in this 2013 cooperative first-person shooter, from banks and armored cars to running a drug lab. Heists can be played with other people or alone with computer-controlled partners, and are picked from Crime.net, a map of the city where contracts appear over time. Many can be done quietly: stay off the cameras, keep civilians from calling the police and kill no more than four of the guards who carry pagers. Some can only be done that way. Once the alarm sounds, though, the crew has to finish the job and carry the loot out through waves of police assaults. A downed player nobody helps up is taken into custody, and on higher difficulties has to be traded back for a hostage. A quiet plan that one mistake turns into a siege still makes every heist play out its own way.