Shaun Munro reviews Payday 2 on Nintendo Switch…
As someone who has skipped every release of Payday 2 over the last five years, the prospect of playing online multiplayer heists from the comfort of my bed – or, let’s be honest, my toilet – courtesy of its new Nintendo Switch release made the allure too powerful to ignore any longer.
Unfortunately, though, it’s honestly pretty tough to see what the fuss is all about in 2018, for despite its intermittent pleasures, Payday 2 on Switch feels like it was lazily rushed to the platform, bereft of voice chat features and lacking the last 8 months of quality-of-life updates. Furthermore, in the years since the game’s original release, squad-based online shooters have become far more prevalent across platforms, and there’s depressingly little to make this one stand out.
The game does have a charmingly simple premise, though; it’s old-school cops ‘n robbers FPS fare for the most part, with players joining a squad of four thieves alongside three others players – either AI or humans online – to perform one of 50 daring heists. It’s novel for a short while, but the gameplay limitations and overall reliance on repetition sadly become quickly apparent.
Far too many of the game’s missions involve storming a locale, using some nifty tech to breach a secure area, stealing something valuable, shooting any cops who try to stop you, and making off in a variety of vehicles. While on paper there’s potential for fun and variety here, the mission objectives typically feel like rote busy-work; babysitting a drill while it spends over 5 minutes boring through a bank vault is, well, boring. The fact you have to restart the drill a number of times to complete the job – which amounts to holding down R for about 15 seconds – only makes this process even more laborious.
The biggest disappoinment, though, is the gunplay. While the Switch’s HD rumble does at least give the gunfire an appropriate kick, there’s no weight to the action, largely because you’re given a comically generous amount of health, and the waves of police are so easy to dispatch. It quickly becomes only mildly less dull than the aforementioned drill exercise, which is a damn shame. You can at least try to play some sequences stealthily, but it’s a relatively insincere suggestion considering how, one way or another, those guns are eventually going to get fired.
Though Payday 2 can be played solo with AI allies, it’s not at all advisable. The AI in this game is, to be kind, not good; on more than one occasion I had to spend several minutes shepherding a cohort into the escape zone to end the mission, and if you’re expecting your teammates to actually assist you with mission objectives, you should forget about that right now.
Where the game occasionally manages to shine is its online mayhem. While the Switch doesn’t exactly have a stellar online infrastructure right now, matchmaking is surprisingly slick, and it generally doesn’t take more than a minute or two to get a match up-and-running. Unlike other Switch ports of multiplayer titles, there does appear to be a healthy player-base ready to roll at launch.
Though the lack of a ready timer to weed out dawdling players is annoying as well as the game pausing for 20-ish seconds every time a new player joins an in-progress mission, four-player online jaunts work relatively well. The game is severely handicapped by its lack of voice chat, though, which can prove especially infuriating if a teammate isn’t towing the line and needs to be hurried along to the next part of the job. In fairness, this is totally Nintendo’s fault so it can’t really be helped, but some text-based commands in lieu would’ve been nice.
In my time with the game there were definitely moments where it clicked completely, where I was paired with like-minded players in a frantic robbery and I felt something approximating the exhilaration that’s made the game so enduringly popular on other platforms over the years. These instances were ultimately few-and-far-between, though, and for much of my play-time I was just carrying out bland tasks on auto-pilot, occasionally shooting cops and then legging it to the escape van to cash-in that sweet, sweet loot.
One benefit of the game being a few years old, though, is that it doesn’t feel mired in the hyper-convoluted progression systems that plague so many contemporary titles; leveling up earns you skill points which can be deployed in a diverse tree of abilities, and spending your hard-earned moolah on new weapons, equipment and masks is a suitably addictive loop. There was never a moment where I felt overwhelmed by the game’s layout, making Payday 2 rather accessible, to say nothing of its overall quality.
Performance-wise, things are basically all over the place. Visually the game appears extremely similar to the 2015 PS4 port, with jaggies being unpleasantly abundant, such that I’d recommend playing it undocked to make them generally less apparent. Payday 2 also struggles to maintain anything close to 30 FPS during intense shootouts in both handheld and docked mode, and I often found it dipping to around the 20 FPS mark in the midst of hairier gunfights. In terms of sound, the musical score mostly settles for generic yet appropriately energetic electronic fare, accompanied by some solidly blistering gunfire effects and plenty of repetitive, even annoying voiceover dialogue.
Coming to Payday 2 without any prior fanfare, it does feel to me like a rather dated proposition in 2018, one that’s made worse by some eyebrow-raising omissions and a baffling AAA price tag. Though it should be mentioned that the game does support local 4-player multiplayer with multiple Switches, let’s be honest, how many of us are going to be able to convince three friends to buy the game, for forty smackeroos no less?
Pros:
+ Easy to pick up and play.
+ Fast matchmaking.
+ Decent amount of content.
Cons:
– Gameplay is often tedious and repetitive.
– The port is out of date.
– Mediocre visuals and performance issues.
– Lack of voice chat.
– Grotesquely overpriced.
Rating: 5/10
Reviewed for Nintendo Switch (also available on PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and PC).
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more video game rambling.
