As a PAYDAY 2 veteran and a week of playing the game, this game has great potential, but needs loads of polishing to be perfect;


Positives:
Combat feels great; great difficulty balance, new skills are fun to play around with and weapons feel and play well

Stealth is fun, with new gimmicks to play around with which makes playing in stealth viable even if you plan on going loud either way

The first 8 heist are very re-playable, as all except for one heist can be done in stealth, and has just enough randomization in them to keep things interesting each run

Character and weapon customization is fantastic! You can level up your weapons for new weapon mods, and with your player level you'll unlock new paints, paint patterns, mask, suits and gloves

Visuals are great already, even before the jump to UE5

Soundtracks a banger

Mentioned it earlier, but the new skill system is super fun! You are able to make skills synergize with each other to make some funky builds


Negatives:
Always online; even when going for solo runs or playing with friends, you have to matchmake, which we already have problems with.

UI looks slick, but functionally is very rough. No chatting on a party/pre-planning screen, your party screen is veery hidden, gun store page has both primary and secondary weapons mixed together, etc.

New challenge-based XP system works on paper, but comes out as annoying most of the time. It is not very satisfying to finish out a heist to get absolutely no XP in the end.

Combat is very well balanced as I said earlier, but personal nitpick would be that it is a bit lame how "meta" armor is right now; You are just shooting yourself on your foot if you don't bring in armor, have the highest level armor on and get armor skills in your build if you go loud on Very Hard - Overkill.

The fact the heist RNG is locked on load, meaning no matter how many times you restart the level stays the same, is both a blessing and a curse: On a good side of things, it can save some time if you failed the heist, but on the other side if you got really bad luck on a heist, too bad bucko.


The review may change in the future considering that the game is still on it's first days of being out, but besides the rough launch, this game is excellent! Not perfect, but if we let that seed grow, it is gonna be fantastic.

Here's hoping that the UE5 transition goes smoothly, and hopefully the game has a bright future