Recent reviews by pH. Laharls_Wrath

This game is incredible and a great illustration of how badly modern MMOs drop the ball in terms of fun raid and encounter design. A small indie dev has put SE and FFXIV raids to shame, game is fun as hell

This is what every digital MTG game should have been and very well could be the best digital CCG on the market.

It plays very similar to Magic however with some of the more complex elements stripped down, some alterations that are only possible with a digital game, and and some attempts to fix common issues like mana screw while retaining a complex mana system.

In terms of simplification, the biggest one is likely the priority system. Unlike Hearthstone it posseses instant speed spells ("fast spells" in this game) which makes each players turn far more engaging. This is, however, simplified from Magic by only giving players priority at certain moments (when a spell is cast, when attackers are declared, at end of turn, etc) and removing the ability to play a spell, retain priority before it resolves, and then play another spell. Instead once a fast spell is played in response priority passes, this goes back and forth until neither player make another play, It allows for the counterspell and buff wars everyone loves but prevents things like pitching your entire hand to Phantasmagorian's ability turn 1.

The mana system is simplified in that there is now "Power" and "Sigils" inplace of lands. When a power card is played it increases your power by 1, this is your mana used to cast spells and is colorless. Most power cards also grant you a specific color sigil (sometimes multiple). This is essentially permanent colored mana. Even if you only have 1 sigil of a color you can cast as many cards of that color as you have the power for (although some cards require you have multiple sigils). This makes it far easier to diversify your mana pool and helps to alleviate the terrible feeling of having an all blue hand and only drawing mountains.

The mulligan system is designed to alleviate mana issues as well, as it guarantees you draw at least 2 power cards. The downside is this does nothing to prevent mana flood. It's also incredibly beneficial for lean aggro decks that run mostly low-cost spells. To avoid people creating decks with only one or two power cards and all 1-2 mana cards, it is mandatory that a deck contain 1/3rd power cards. At first I reeled against this restriction but 1/3rd is still less than the 20+lands in an average 60card Magic deck so it has less of an impact than it seeems.

I do currently have a minor qualm with deck construction, which is the minimum of 75 cards. Deck size being this large means you will have games where you just don't hit a key card for the situation. It can be remedied to an extent with draw cards and tutors however the game could stand to have more of those. That being said there are some combos that allow you to draw through plenty of your deck. I do feel like the deck size (and card pool) do hinder combo based decks though.

At the moment it seems like straight aggro and midrange are two of the more dominant strategies, which is disappointing, however I've been playing control with good success and hear there are tier 1/2 control decks so aside from combo being weak and a large chunk of play being creature based the metagame seems healthy. I've yet to encounter anything too cancerous.

At this point I'm rambling so I'll cut it short and list bullet points:
-More polished than other digital MTG games
-More complex than Hearthstone with more rooms for outplay and less RNG
-Simpler than MTG
-Long standing issues like mana screw have been lessened however can still occur on occasion
-Combo seems weak in the current cardset
-Additional polish, cards, balance tweaks are bound to happen
-It's FREE just download it

It looks like a cheap Hearthstone and sounds like a cheap MTG, but when you play it the game is actually really good

Incredibly charming, I'd highly recommend to any fan of esports or anyone who has put in the work to play a game competitively. A nice reminder of the work competing takes but also why we do it. It only takes an hour or so to get through and may also have the side effect of making you miss when SC2 was the premier esport back in the WoL era.

I'm not entirely sure where to begin with this game. When I first got it I absolutely loved it. Sure it had a lot of flaws, barebones gun mechanics and mediocre wave shooting with an even more barebones stealth system. But it was a heist game, and if you took it as arcadey fun rather than seriously it was a blast to play with a group of friends or buddies.

I was able to and willing to ignore the massive XP grind (starting from level 0 you can level to a maximum of 100 before going infamous, essentially a prestige system) which gets exponentially harder to the point where the first 50 levels fly by and the next 10 after that take roughly as long. Coupled with this the other reward from completing heists, money, becomes virtually useless once you reach a certain level as you end up with a ludicrous abundance of it with little to spend it on (especially due to the fact that weapon modifications are unlocked via a card system where you randomly obtain a mask, mask pattern, mask color, weapon modification, or bonus cash/xp upon completing a mission). But none of this was a huge issue, because the game was fun. Who cares about the game's reward system if the game itself is fun, that is the reward.

And then update 24 hit
This update, advertised as the death wish update, also featured half-finished changes to the game's stealth mechanics. To better suit the developers vision, more guards were added and guards were changed to respawn during stealth missions, coupled with a nerf to the number of body bags you could use and with a hard cap on the number of pagers you could answer (every time a guard is killed you have to answer his pager, a maximum of 2, or 4 if traited, can be answered before the alarm triggers automatically) means that clearing the levels of guards no longer became a viable option. While you could argue this increased the difficulty of stealthing missions, in reality it just made them tedious and by removing this option from the players left them with a stealth system that was no longer fully functional. Stealthing missions, rather than being harder, has now simply become more tedious. Since the player cannot be proactive and hunt down guards they must sit and wait and pray that the RNG is on their side and the guards path away from the objective. This is not more challenging gameplay, this isn't gameplay at all, it’s staring at a screen. Stealthing missions is just no longer fun. Couple this with the fact that it is now possible for guard/camera spawns could end up making certain missions no longer possible (framing frame day 1 guard/camera/laser arrangement, if you're unlucky) as well as the fact that the peer to peer system means guards may end up facing a different direction or in a different location on your screen than the hosts, resulting in being spotted from behind or through a wall, it becomes clear the Overkill (the developer of payday 2) applied a bandaid 'fix' to the difficulty of stealth rather than a properly developed and tested rework that breaks and fundamentally changes the mechanics of a fully released game that people have purchased and enjoyed purely for the sake of making players 'earn' their XP and ingame money while playing (a concept in and of itself that is utterly inane but this isn't the place for that).

The death wish update is, at its core, a beta path. It's a beta patch for a game that has been fully released and already offers multiple dlc packs. Overkill have announced that they have plans to finish the stealth overhaul, at which point it will hopefully be functional, however there is no excuse for breaking their customer's games with half a patch and forcing them to wait for an eventual fix. They are, at the moment, selling an unfinished product as if it were a completed game. This is dishonest business at its very core and something no responsible consumer should support.

In the event that the stealth rework is completed and remedies current problems by making the stealth not only functional but enjoyable again (by adding much needed depth so that it involves gameplay rather than waiting on RNG) then perhaps Payday 2 will be worthwhile again, however at its core it will not be the game that was sold to me (and prior customers) and will not be the game the maps were designed around. I am doubtful, at best, that Overkill will strike the proper balance between ‘challenge’ and ‘fun’ that they aim for and I'm fairly certain that the only skill tree without a large number of combat buffs, the ghost tree, will merely become a worthless shell used only for a few key traits.

This uncertainty is reinforced by the nature of the other changes featured in death wish update 24. The most noteworthy of these changes is the newly added difficulty for which the patch is named, Death Wish. Featuring a new variant of the bulldozer (one of the more difficult to kill elite enemies) as well as new a more difficult variant of the swat/fbi units, the teaser trailer showed enemies behaving in a more intelligent manner hiding behind shield bearers while a separate squad moved behind cover to flank. The result, however, was just a difficulty where the enemies were turned into massive sponges and the damage they dealt was scaled through the roof. In an attempt to make Death Wish difficult damage was ramped up so much that armor became next to irrelevant, even the weakest of enemies could tear through the toughest of armor in a few hitscan shots. This poorly thought out change marred the already shaky balance between different builds within the game and had heists on Death Wish feel more like they came down to luck than player ability. Much like stealth it became a case of RNG over gameplay, although to an arguably lesser degree.

The other change implemented in DW24 was the addition of bonus XP awarded to heists you haven't completed recently. While this boost quickly becomes negligible due to the massive XP grind, it's a nice incentive to diversify heists from time to time and it certainly doesn't hurt anything. What is harmful, however, is the other side of the coin. Alongside these XP boosts a penalty was increased for running the same heist frequently. Payday 2 does not feature a massive number of heists, it doesn’t take long for the average player to play them all and learn enough of the basics to decide which ones they enjoy running and which they do not. This change actively penalizes players trying to learn and master a particular heist as well as those who simply want to play the heists they enjoy, the heists they have fun playing. Overall this means the level grind will become that much worse as not only do XP requirements grow exponentially but now XP gain is crippled. Grinding in multiplayer games is used as an artificial way of extending the game's life in an attempt to keep the player base around while developers work on new additions. The increased grind, in my eyes, merely shows Overkill's lack of confidence that they can finish the stealth rework and other promised changes (skill rework, more heists, etc.) in any reasonable amount of time. It's an underhanded tactic and poor game design.

Ultimately, Overkill have broken their game with a half-finished patch, have done nothing to warrant trust that they'll properly repair it, and are selling an unfinished product and thus I cannot honestly recommend this game to anyone despite how much I used to enjoy it