Recent reviews by Pago

Over the past 2 years, I've racked up a couple hundred hours in Payday 2 and I can say without a doubt that I've enjoyed my time playing this game; this is despite the fact I have bought little to no DLC for the game (with the exception of the Gage Courier and Hotline Miami 2 DLCs). I feel that the accusations of Overkill's jewery were unjust, as ultimately the game was playable without the DLCs and the DLCs that were added to the game tended to be reasonable in terms of game balance. I say tended to, as recently power creep has been nipping at the heels of the community, with certain weapons (e.g. katana) being a little unbalanced and other updates forcing players to rely on explosives to get by (Captain Winters). If I were to end the review here though, I would have recommended the game to anyone who enjoys a co-op FPS, the game has its issues sure, but at the end of the day manages to be a fairly balanced game with a lot of versatility in not only the weapons a player can use but the heists too.

However, things are rarely that simple. It seems Overkill have given up on the concept of balance and have instead decided to make the game thoroughly pay2win; and that's coming from a person who dislikes using that term. Recently, an update has been added in which players can spend real world money in order obtain new skins. Okay, that doesn't sound TOO bad you may say (ignoring the fact that this was given as a crimefest reward) and honestly, yes, I would be inclined to agree, they are just skins at the end of the day. The problem is that some of the rarer skins have better stats attached to them, meaning a player with a flashier, pricier gun can outperform a player that is skilled at the game. Now, you may say that Payday 2 is PvE and thus that point is moot, but you're forgetting that people have to put time into the game to get good at it. You need an understanding of the skill trees, the perk decks, the weapons and the heists themselves in order to be successful, and adding pay2win guns that do half of the job for you completely unbalance the state of the game. Why bother learning to be decent at the game when you can just pay your shekels to Overkill?

This, and the nerfing of weapon mods to make their bonuses almost nonexistent (at least based on the update page) has lead me to give this game a thumbs down. A damn shame, because I still think the game is great at its core, but I refuse to support a company that doesn't respect its community. If overkill reconsiders, and at the very least removes skin bonuses I may change the review to a thumbs up, but I'm not holding my breath.

EDIT 25/06/16: While I'm still not happy about Overcuck's previous business strategies, they seem to have made at least some attempt to reduce the amount of microtransactions and the effect they have on weapon stats. While this is probably more of an attempt to save face, I do appreciate that they are at least listening to the community. Like I agreed, I'll change my review to positive with the hope that we don't get screwed again anytime soon.

Using new pattented anti-cyka technology, Dota 2 will make you fluent in Russian within a couple of weeks.