Very disappointed, still can't bring myself to play this game. It's been well over a year and the updates are pretty horrible...I hate how they can't even let you play the dlc missions without owning them...like what? Payday2 is still the best, I hope in the near future the developers actually put effort and make this game playable because for now it's not worth anyone's time.

I can only recommend this game with caveats. I consider it a disappointment. In many ways, it is a downgrade from Payday 2, which I considered a improvement on the original Payday. However, if you haven't played 1 or 2, I still think there is enjoyment here - ignorance is bliss. I'll highlight various features of the game at a high level that I think are relevant.

Being able to do most jobs "loud" or "quiet" is great fun. The different difficulties are appreciated, and the special enemies are not cheesy (looking at you, the original Payday 2 cloaker...).

Common to a great many games today, the menus are bad and the explanations are mediocre to poor. This is fixable, and there have been some changes to the menus since launch, but it is still bad. This is an annoyance because it makes trying to enjoy the game more difficult. I think the character system is okay, but the lack of clarity on the build you have (which skills trigger which of the various states) to be annoying - you better just remember because the game isn't going to tell you. When I'm 3 levels deep into menus to adjust skills for a build from the main menu, and 4 deep to do weapon mods, I question my life choices a bit. Finally, when you're at this many levels in, you'd think that the information must all certainly fit into the screen you're on - wrong. You'll need to still scroll up and down in the skills and "left to right" in the weapon customization to get to the all the options. Ugh. The Payday 2 menus weren't great, but they were better than this.

This next one is a personal preference, I admit. The weapon leveling, I just don't like it. There is no general proficiency in pistols or shotguns for example, instead, every weapon has its own proficiency that then unlocks upgrades for the weapon. Also, the levels merely unlock upgrades - there doesn't seem to be a general improvement in the weapon handling, accuracy, etc. Given the specific leveling for the weapons, I expected there to be some improvements in general weapon proficiency, but I sure don't notice anything, and again, back to the menus, if there is a bonus, it says nothing about it and it is so minimal that you don't notice.

However, the weapon upgrades themselves? They seem to be balanced very well. I haven't noticed anything just straight up makes the weapons way better. I do appreciate the general consistency, but also, I can't tell that the upgrades are doing much. Dialing it back from Payday 2 isn't a bad thing since Payday 3 is less of a horde shooter so having comically accurate hipfire is less appropriate here. Still, I appreciate the balance, even if I wish the mod effects were a touch more noticeable on the weapons.

The character builds seem promising, but again, like the weapon mods, the skills don't seem to do a whole lot for you in most cases when you're just out there blazing away - better git gud at aiming, target selection, using cover, etc. Now, maybe I'm just being a moron and there are some skills that I'm not using correctly, or cool combos yet to be discovered. I haven't unlocked all the skills (they added a lot since I played early on, and I did have them all then), and as you go up in character level you get more skill points to use, and I'm not max level yet. Suffice it to say, there may be more here than I'm capable of accurately portraying, but at like 50 hours of in-game shooting and running around, I expected to be more familiar than this. Again, poor descriptions don't help, it took me three jobs to confirm that one skill wasn't doing what I thought it was and figure out what it was doing to my own satisfaction - a clearer description would have saved me all that time and more than a little in-game frustration. (Specifically "Plate up" doesn't restore anarmor chunk back to full, it just negates the need to "wait" to restore the portion of the damaged chunk that could be restored normally. Not a bad thing, but if you think it will restore the chunk whenever you're picking up ammo and instead you're constantly bleeding armor because you can only ever restore a bit of it, you make poor in-game life choices...)

On the flip side, building a character to be quiet and sneak around is VERY rewarding with a lot of fun skills and ways to do the job, and the end result is very fun.

I will admit to not having messed with the preset weapons much, and I tend to play solo with just bots, but I'm just getting back into the game after they pushed out a ton of updates and I'm trying to learn the build system in detail and really give it a fair shake, I'm one of the people who experienced the extreme suffering of day 1/week 1/month 1 server problems and said "you work this out, I'll be back".

So, if you loved Payday 2, I can't say you'll love 3. If you've never played a Payday game, there are some cool stealth/loud features and a lot of generall silliness around to enjoy. As someone who pre-ordered the game, I'm disappointed, still, in the state of the game, but I don't think that makes it a bad game, it is more about my expectations than anything else. Payday 2 was, from day 1, a very good game, and generally, it got better to the point that I consider it one of my most favorite games, ever. Payday 3 is fine, really, and I'd say much better quiet than loud. If you're looking to just blaze away like a maniac from Payday 2, I think you'll end up a bit disappointed.

This marks the death of the "Payday" franchise. A dismal day for shareholders in the heist game genre