PAYDAY 2

This game trumps its predecessor in all ways.

The Payday clown gang are back, and this time they have more allies and a better skill upgrade tree system that lets players juggle skill points between different class trees. You have the option of specializing or being a jack of all trades. You also have a wide array of weapons, modifications and masks to spend your money on but ultimately it is the skills that will be burning most of your cash - especially if you try to become "Infamous" which literally burns your stock piled money as a sort of New Game+.

Unlike the previous game you can actually complete missions stealthily now and move hostages around, which is pretty close to a multiplayer cooperative Thief game that I've been wanting for ages. Also, you are no longer thrown in (as) blind like before where the ludicrous objectives would often catch you by surprise. Now you can purchase mission beneficial equipment to help your task, and some missions offer blueprints which you can draw on to strategize with your allies before hand.

Probably the only thing I can complain about here is that it becomes a more serious game that the last? The previous game had tasks were so wacky and police waves like an assault of lemmings that it was pretty funny, letting me toss aside the "I'm playing a bad guy" somewhat. In this one there's a mission where you have to make drugs. Meth to be precise. Not just a button click either, you get the components and have to actively put them into the makeshift lab to get bags of produce. Because you're branching out from armed robbery into drug dealing I guess. More annoyingly sometimes it takes forever to connect to a multiplayer game. Not sure what that's about.

Those issues aside it is a pretty addictive coop FPS and/or FPSneaker and I give it four and a half bullets out of five. Unfortunately, it also makes the first Payday pretty moot. If you are new to the franchise, feel free to skip buying Payday: The Heist and jump straight to this one. I'm putting my brothers video of one of their early runs if you want to see what its like in game.