Once again, this also folds quite neatly into the notion of risk/reward and whether that lone remaining gold rolex behind that dark blue wall of guns and riot shields is really worth it or not. Additionally, you also need to be on the lookout for a variety of unsecured loot and valuables too priceless watches, ornate chokers, cash registers and more are all lying around waiting to be scooped up and in doing so, their incremental value adds nicely to your overall heist total.

If you’re cracking a safe with a drill for instance, you need to keep one eye on the thing to repair whenever it brakes down since, rather annoyingly, this can and does happen quite often. Of course, it’s not just the lads in blue that you need to worry about either, it’s the actual mechanics of the heist itself as well. Such decision-making is just the tip of a taut, frenetic management metagame that exists beneath Payday’s visceral first-person shooter trappings and it’s an aspect of Overkill’s series that is often overlooked in favour of its more obvious appeal. With the cops swarming the streets and attacking you from every angle, do you escape with the bare minimum amount of loot, or, do you linger a little longer scooping up every bit of finery that you can while hoping that the fuzz don’t completely overwhelm your team in the process?

In actual fact, it’s that whole risk/reward dynamic which beats ever strongly at the heart of Payday’s trickier scenarios. Not all of Payday’s heists necessarily prescribe mutually exclusive methods either, and often, when a particular mission is attempted via stealthy means only to devolve into an all-out war on the streets (again, neatly echoing the visceral chaos of Michael Mann’s twenty year old cinematic opus), it’s here that Payday operates at its most engaging best, forcing the player to improvise in order to escape with both the loot and their lives. A robbery of military factory on the docks might demand a stealthy approach, while a full-on assault on a convoy of treasury trucks would instead require a much more confrontational, guns blazing approach in order to get the job done.

Better yet is the fact that the different heist sorties each require varying levels of skill and approaches to be successfully completed.

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