PAYDAY 3 is the newest installment of the heist simulator and FPS horde shooter series developed by Starbreeze Studios. Read our full review to learn all our thoughts about the game and if it’s worth your time and money.
PAYDAY 3 Review and Score Explanation
PAYDAY 3 Review and Score Explanation
| Overall | PAYDAY 3 looks to modernize the classic heist simulator series after giving 10 years of continuous updates to PAYDAY 2. Boasting new cutting edge graphics, expanded but familiar gameplay, and an exceptional soundtrack, PAYDAY 3 provides a great experience with its handful of heists that are jam-packed with tons of depth and replayability. It has its downsides, though. The matchmaking system is a downgrade, it has very disorganized menus, its lobby system is lacking, and the game is still plagued with bugs and network connectivity issues. PAYDAY 3 is still a highly enjoyable game. But it lacks a good finish and polish. Even with a decade of experience from its previous title, it fails to apply all crucial lessons that made PAYDAY 2 feel special. |
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| Story | PAYDAY 3 has shifted to presenting a single-player campaign with multiplayer elements, which is a big departure from PAYDAY 2’s focus on multiplayer. The story content serves to connect all heists together and become the main driving force behind the gang’s crime spree. Unfortunately, the first few cutscene animatics merely served as transitions for random unconnected heists, ending up as haphazard plot devices. Things improve in the latter half, when they finally connect the overarching narrative with the mission objectives. The implementation is sound and achieves its purpose but, the simplicity of the story and its primary function to tether the heists ultimately causes it to lack depth. |
| Gameplay | With modernized core mechanics and gameplay that made PAYDAY 2 so great, heists feel different but all the more the same. There are several additions and improvements that raise the skill ceiling and allow greater freedom of player expression. But, with all the new cool new options, a few key features are glaringly absent. Some mainstay mechanics had their usability drastically reduced, which begs the question of why they were brought over to the new title in the first place. On the whole, PAYDAY 3 evolves upon the excellent gameplay of its predecessor. But it makes some questionable and significant omissions from PAYDAY 2 that would only have served to elevate the final product. |
| Visuals | PAYDAY 3 takes its predecessor’s graphics and cranks it up to 11, achieving excellent realistic visuals comparable with any big budget game. Maps are rich with environmental design that breathes life and immerses players. Characters’ masks and suits return to look pristine in the modern engine, and character animations feel better and smoother. However, even with all the shiny new upgrades, its user interface (UI) fails to live up to modern standards. Befuddled with confusing menus, a lack of information labels, and long scrollable lists, the game is infuriating to navigate. Half the difficulty of the game will be understanding and navigating the menus. |
| Audio | PAYDAY 2 has been continually praised by the community for its astounding soundtrack, putting great pressure on PAYDAY 3 to match or even to surpass its predecessor. They did not disappoint. With Gustavo Coutinho as the sole composer, he provides an electrifying new feeling for the soundtrack while still injecting listeners with adrenaline. Aside from the soundtrack, the NPCs, from enemies to hostages, are now more expressive and immersive, with an abundance of situational voice lines that add to the charm of the game. The only downside is the combat and gun SFXs sound weird and weak, not having enough punch behind them to feel effective nor powerful. |
| Value for Money | Though PAYDAY 3 only contains 8 playable heists, they contain so much depth and alternative routes which incentivizes players to replay them for the full experience. With 4 levels of difficulty, an exciting soundtrack, and the option to proceed all sneaky-beaky-like or run in guns blazing, each heist has a deceptive amount of content and replayability. However, that’s pretty much where all of the polish went. Bugs and network issues are prominent, making matchmaking unreliable. This will cause you to go on solo runs or spend most of your time trying to make sense of the disorienting menus. If you can get through all of those issues and get on heists with other people, the co-op gameplay and soundtrack will certainly recuperate the money you spent. |
PAYDAY 3 Full Review
Pros of PAYDAY 3
| Things PAYDAY 3 Got Right |
|---|
 Improved and Expanded Gameplay Mission Accessibility Killer Soundtrack and Immersive Sound Design |
Improved and Expanded Gameplay
PAYDAY 3 adds upon the core Stealth and Loud gameplay mechanics from its predecessor, with the Casing and Masked modes receiving some fresh new options and improvements. Casing mode is the default mode of the crew as they load into most missions. In this mode, they appear like normal everyday civilians to infiltrate premises, scout for information, and mark objects of interest. Masked mode, on the other hand, enables all movement options, such as running, crouching, and jumping, environment interactions, such as lockpicking, moving bodies and looting, and the use of all guns and equipment.
Now, Casing mode allows all movement options and environment interactions unlocked, with only jumping, vaulting, and sliding unavailable. This tremendously expands the capabilities of Casing mode, marking a huge change from PAYDAY 2’s requirement of going into Masked mode just to pick locks or bag money. Casing-mode-only runs are also now viable, providing another challenge for skillful players to creatively conquer.
With most options already available in Casing mode, Masked mode gets two additional movement options new to the franchise. Players can now vault over and slide under objects, provided there is enough space. Sliding down slopes give a quick boost in speed, vaulting is smooth and can shave off crucial seconds. This is a small but very appreciated introduction of more movement possibilities, useful for dodging, and for style.
PAYDAY 3 has brought out the big guns as well, with its new Overkill Weapons. Overkill Weapons are extremely powerful guns that are given to the players in missions after filling the Overkill Meter. For every enemy killed in battle, the Overkill Meter fills up. Once full, it enables players to call in a drop order and receive the Overkill Weapon on the battlefield. Simple enough. This requirement essentially limits its use exclusively to Loud runs. It’s useful during times when things have taken a turn for the worst, requiring desperate measures to turn the tides, or as a means to instill further fear and mayhem across the map. It’s all up to you when and how you plan to Overkill.
A cool new feature are proximity-based objectives, which require players to stay within certain zones or stay in close proximity with moving targets to progress. Having to keep close to someone is clearly inspired by the “tailing missions” you may find in other stealth games, and it’s a surprisingly good fit for PAYDAY in Casing mode. Staying within certain zones forces players to be dynamic by finding ways to face the opposition head on, or to be wily and survive gunfire long enough to get to cover.
A neat implementation of the proximity based function is escorting. Being caught in a private area while in Casing mode is now much more forgiving. Before, when fully discovered by a security guard, the game forces players to mask up and initiate combat. Now, when caught, players can stop whatever they were doing to comply with the guard’s orders and be promptly escorted into a public area. You will have to stay in their proximity while being escorted to avoid triggering any alerts or arrests in order to not jeopardize a stealth run. This is a great addition which acts as a safety net for players going for a stealth run but mistakenly get caught by guards, or a viable strategy to safely leave a private area.
Mission Accessibility
PAYDAY 2 often confused newcomers with its heist select screen, “Crime.net.” It was a large digital map where new heists of varying difficulty appeared randomly, alongside currently open heists hosted by other players. Players selected ongoing heists visible on Crime.net to join other people. As a gigantic board populated by unknown missions and players filled up the screen, it was not beginner friendly to say the least. There were no hints or even a gentle nudge towards which heist new players should choose should they wish to become familiar with the game and story.
PAYDAY 3 fixes this by implementing a horizontal heist select screen, with cutscene animatics in between heists that tell the story. The player chooses a difficulty, and the automatic system finds other players that chose the same difficulty. The progression of the running story is easily accessible alongside its corresponding missions. Newcomers can immediately identify a starting point and commence playing, making the onboarding so much easier.
Killer Soundtrack and Immersive Sound Design
The soundtrack being full of bangers is expected of the series at this point, with PAYDAY 2’s soundtrack being iconic in many ways. PAYDAY 1 composer Simon Viklund, alongside a young freelancer Gustavo Coutinho, produced the majority of the tracks. Later, Le Castle Vania from the John Wick film franchises contributed an EP. Loading into heists and hearing the beats drop elevated PAYDAY 2, an already great game to an excellent one.
With several years of experience gathered under his belt, Coutinho is now by his lonesome to compose for PAYDAY 3. Suffice to say, he manages to knock it out of the park. The tracks have a different feel from its predecessor, but are still able to bring that feeling of controlled mayhem. Each heist has its own unique pieces, and every single one of them has been stellar. From the atmosphere’s intensity building up throughout the several phases of stealth, to the ferocity of the beat drop as the police assault starts, the transitions are flawless. While it’s still not good enough to contend with the masterpiece that is PAYDAY 2’s music, Coutinho’s work is the perfect fit for the sequel, serving as his grand statement on becoming the main composer.
Moving away from the soundtrack, a significant improvement PAYDAY 3’s sound design has over PAYDAY 2 is giving the NPCs even more situational voice lines. Previously, regular enemies occasionally shouted and barked orders. Special enemies had a few taunts to yell at the player, but that was the extent of it. Now, every enemy, and even civilians and hostages, have relevant voice lines regarding specific situations.
Regular enemies bark orders to surrender or general threats when engaging with players, as well as react to their teammates getting killed. Special enemies have even more voice lines, adding context to their abilities and personalities. Shields, who can withstand bullets with their Riot Shields, advise their teammates to get behind them as they move towards the player. Dozers, covered from head to toe with thick and heavy armor, are way more aggressive and very vulgar as they make their slow approach.
Cloakers, the agile ninjas, were already perfect in the previous game, so they retained the iconic siren alarm sound they emitted as they rushed towards their targets at breakneck speed. Best of all, they still hurl a volley of condescending insults when they instantly down players, continuously battering them for extended periods of time.
Normal civilians now have situational reactions when bumped into while in Casing mode. Newly alerted civilians freak out and scream for help once any sign of danger is present. When they get shouted at, they start begging and pleading, further contextualizing their innocence. They’ll also frequently cry out when tied down and taken as hostages. Accidentally shooting hostages has never felt so heavy on the conscience.
The campy voice acting performances add a lot of charm to the action and fit the vibe of the franchise that has had sarcastic undertones from its predecessor. It’s a feature comically executed that enriches player interactions and adds more fun to the PAYDAY world.
Cons of PAYDAY 3
| Things PAYDAY 3 Can Improve |
|---|
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Worse Matchmaking Confusing Menus Horrible Pre-Planning Lobby |
Worse Matchmaking
PAYDAY 2’s mission select screen, “Crime.net,” was extensively used to find open multiplayer missions. Players were able to see which missions were open, and could easily choose which ones to join. This allowed for people to discover unfamiliar or harder missions in public to try them out. It was also a means for the veteran players to join and help lower leveled players that required assistance. Having all missions of varying difficulty be publicly visible and accessible to the players ensured that parties had a good flow of other players participating, leading to substantial amounts of co-op experiences.
PAYDAY 3 has removed the ease and accessibility that Crime.net once had, and in its place is the new, more straightforward, automatic matchmaking system. Its presentation makes it suddenly feel like an always-online single-player campaign game with multiplayer elements. I praised the implementation of the campaign, but only in terms of it being helpful for linear progression.
The automated system is not ideal for populating the vastly split up matchmaking queues. With the game’s 8 missions having 4 difficulty levels each, that’s 32 different queues split up. Players have no idea which missions of what difficulty are currently being played, and therefore have to guess and hope that someone else picked the 1 out of 32 queues they’re also in. It’s a terrible way to find parties, as it heavily depends on a very populated player base to be queuing for all missions and difficulties at most times.
Though the automated campaign-system is a good inclusion, it would have been better to have both it, AND a new version of Crime.net. New heists started from the campaign screen could be posted on a big map, allowing other players to see and join. Players utilizing the automated system can opt to start their queues as an empty party, or be automatically sorted into existing parties on Crime.net.
This theoretical implementation would give much more flexibility and possibility of getting teammates to actually participate in co-op play, and is a natural evolution of Crime.net from PAYDAY 2. This would’ve provided accessibility to newer players who are new to the series as well.
Confusing Menus
The problems residing within PAYDAY 3’s user interface aren’t extremely egregious, but rather it’s the tiny details that pile up and break the camel’s back. The main menu SEEMS sleek, compact, and responsive, but is largely empty and only serves to hide the disorganization of its inner contents.
The Heists screen has no indicators at all whether a heist is stealth or loud, stealth only, or loud only. That becomes a problem for players preparing their weapons and gear beforehand.
The skill tree screen is a mess, lacking any intuitive design at all besides adding yellow notches and cards to selected skills. They basically just said whatever and dumped all the skills into a long list. Good luck scrolling through everything while trying to make sense of anything. The help blurb only offers surface level information, and doesn’t really contribute to the grand scheme of understanding the skill tree.
The Vendors tab is another grave offender of dumping things into a long list and going “Oh well.” Within the Vendors tab are sub-tabs that sell different items. However, some of those sub-tabs have different categories as well. And they’re “arranged” by being listed one after the other, into a long pile. Couldn’t they have made smaller tabs for sub-tabs to organize it better? Or maybe just split the Vendors tab to populate the large swathes of white space? The worst part of this is they placed important pre-planning favors at the very bottom of one sub-tab. Pre-planning favors are additional resource drops placed within missions that can be interacted with to restore health, ammo, and armor. This means everyone will need to scroll all the way down to purchase resource drops when their favors have been depleted, something they’ll need to do very frequently.
Speaking of pre-planning…
Horrible Pre-Planning Lobby
Another feature that is noticeably worse is Pre-Planning. When joining a lobby, players were privy to an extensive Pre-Planning stage, where they could buy favors for resource drops, information, or insider help. While party members can still acquire resource drops after purchasing them separately from the Vendor, there isn’t a more tactical in-depth study phase of using favors to look at floor plans, plant cameras at select spots, or get an insider to plant gear in advance throughout the map. The UI of consuming favors is also confusing and unintuitive in and of itself.
PAYDAY 2 also lacked pre-planning at first. It was introduced in a DLC, and was later fully implemented for the main game. If they’re planning on repeating the same procedure for the latest title, then it’s a big oversight for such a beloved and useful feature. This is something that needs to come back for the stealth-focused missions as soon as possible. The preparation phase before heists was crucial in immersing players into the role of master heisters, and its absence leaves a very sizable hole in the experience.
Besides pre-planning, the lobby itself lacks utility and functionality. There is no form of chat at all, preventing any discussion between party members on whether to prepare for a Stealth or Loud run. Prior planning and discussion are prominent social features in PAYDAY 2, but they’re effectively nowhere to be found here. Lastly. and most annoyingly, is that once someone presses “Ready”, they can’t “Unready” afterwards. Why is canceling one’s Ready status not even an available feature? There were numerous instances where I forgot to switch loadouts or changed my mind and instinctively went to press the Ready button to cancel it, to be then reminded that I apparently had no choice in the matter. “Readying” and “Unreadying” is such a basic feature in other multiplayer games (even in PAYDAY 2) and it’s mind boggling it wasn’t implemented.
PAYDAY 3 Overview & Premise
The story of Payday 3 takes place several years after the original Payday gang’s reign of terror in New York. Due to the emergence of a new threat to their lives, the group decides to step back out of their early retirement and get back to the life of crime.
Who Should Play PAYDAY 3?
PAYDAY 3 is Recommended if You Enjoy:
• Past PAYDAY titles
• Hitman Series
• Left 4 Dead
• Going Sneaky Stealth or Guns Blazing
Fans of past installments will have plenty to enjoy in PAYDAY 3. Several mechanics return unchanged but also revamped. There are some fresh new inclusions, but also with some significant omissions. There’s still a lot to enjoy if you have experience with past titles, but be prepared to relearn some, and make do without some.
Players have the freedom to accomplish their list of objectives on their own, whether silently or loudly. Going stealth is an open channel for player expression with how they wish to proceed, similar to Hitman. Going loud is a straightforward fun wave-based horde-shooter, reminiscent of Left 4 Dead. Fans of both are free to play most missions which can be completed in either way.
Is PAYDAY 3 Worth It?
Get Past the Menus and Matchmaking Then You’re Good
PAYDAY 3 can be purchased for $39.99, a much lower price than modern premium games. The game is full of fun heists that have so much replayability depending on how you want to play. Each heist has its own dynamic soundtrack and every single one is a certified banger. It’s almost a Rock- EDM album that coincidentally comes with a game.
However, there are still glaring issues with its matchmaking and menus that need a lot of patience to understand and get through. Once you’re in a game though, the experience is worth it.
If you’re a fan of heisting or forgoing subtlety and killing everything in sight (hostages excluded), and you have good enough patience, PAYDAY 3 is a very worthwhile purchase. Hopefully Its problems will eventually get fixed, and content is expanded further in the future.
How PAYDAY 3 Matches Up to Recently-Released Games
| Games That Came Out Recently | Why Get PAYDAY 3? | Why Get the Other Game? |
|---|---|---|
 Party Animals |
PAYDAY 3 is a heist simulator and horde shooter FPS. If you prefer that genre, get PAYDAY 3. | Party Animals is a fun party game for friends to play. If you’re looking for a quick fun casual gaming session with a few other people, Party Animals is heavily recommended. |
 Lies of P |
Those looking for a multiplayer co-op FPS experience should be looking to get PAYDAY 3 over Lies of P. | Lies of P is a narrative-driven soulslike single-player game starring Pinocchio. If you’re itching to get the closest thing to Bloodborne on PC, then Lies of P is the game for you. |
 Mortal Kombat 1 |
PAYDAY 3 is an online co-op FPS where teammates work together to accomplish heists and steal money. If you prefer teamwork with randoms online, go for PAYDAY 3. | Mortal Kombat 1 is the newest release of the classic fighting game. Gamers who are looking for an online fighting game experience between two individuals, Mortal Kombat 1 is a safe bet. |
How PAYDAY 3 Matches Up to Similar Games
| Games Similar to PAYDAY 3 | Why Get PAYDAY 3 ? | Why Get the Other Game? |
|---|---|---|
 PAYDAY 2 |
If you find yourself wanting a more modern version of the PAYDAY series, and overwhelmed with the staggering amount of content in PAYDAY 2, then the newest title is definitely a recommended starting point. | If you find the content in PAYDAY 3 lacking, and wish to get a more fleshed out game with a still-populated multiplayer experience, PAYDAY 2 is always a safe bet for any returning or new player. |
 Hitman 3 |
If you prefer having more linear objectives in stealth, but still want a touch of freedom to go about it your way, PAYDAY 3 is a great first person heist-simulator. Being caught does not result in heavy penalties or game over, but rather transitions into a horde shooter where the objectives change. | Hitman 3’s stealth and gameplay is much more open ended, allowing greater leeway to get creative into accomplishing objectives. Hitman 3 is recommended for those who wish for more espionage and less horde-shooting gameplay. |
 Left 4 Dead2 |
PAYDAY 3 has stealth mechanics to go through missions and complete objectives, but also the option to go all out and face numerous enemies with tough special classes. Recommended for those who wish for hybrid playstyles. | An all-time classic in the horde-shooter genre, Left 4 Dead 2 features much more countless enemies and terrifying special classes. Heavily recommended if you only prefer the FPS experience. |
Payday 3 Trailers
LaunchTrailer
The launch trailer to commemorate the game’s long-awaited release.
Gamescom Trailer
Their Gamescom teaser featured a new heist and a lot of gunplay that netted them the two Gamescom awards of “Best PC Game” and “Most Entertaining.”
Game8 Reviews
Payday 3 Product Information
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| Title | PAYDAY 3 |
|---|---|
| Release Date | September 21, 2023 |
| Developer | Starbreeze Studios, Overkill Software |
| Publisher | Prime Matter, Plaion, Deep Silver |
| Supported Platforms | PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S |
| Genre | First Person Shooter, Heist Simulator, Horde Shooter |
| Number of Players | 4 |
