Recent reviews by Fallaxia

Ich habe mit Arma Reforger vor allem eines bekommen "schöne Screenshots".
Was ich leider nicht bekommen habe ist ein spielbares Spiel.

# Es stürzt sehr oft ab, stets beim dritten Server zu dem ich verbinde.

# Die KI ist dumm wie Brot. Ich meine damit wirklich dumm. Bei Arma war die KI ja nie besonders gut und hatte schon Schwierigkeiten über eine Brücke zu fahren, aber bei Arma Reforger schafft es eine KI einfach ruhig weiter zu patroullieren, während die KI vor ihr und hinter ihr beschossen werden. Stört sie nicht, sie patroulliert weiter.

# Es sind kaum Community Inhalte zu finden, das was man findet ist ein wildes Reparieren von Dingen die einfach zu kurz kommen.

#Es gibt keine Kampagne, nichtmal eine kleine, um zu zeigen was die Engine kann. Man hat sich auf einen Hindernisparcours beschränkt, der langweilig ist.

#Im Multiplayer hat man weder andere Spieler (die Server sind leer) noch Möglichkeiten selber eine "COOP" Mission zu spielen. Ich meine, wie schwer wäre es gewesen einen dynamischen Missionsgenerator einzufügen, der einfache COOP Missionen generiert. Es wird doch heute immer so viel von "AI Automatisierung gesprochen", da ist das doch sicher möglich, auch bei einem Early Access Spiel. Es ist die wichtigste Aufgabe des Entwicklerstudios die Community am Ball zu halten und mit Möglichkeiten statt mit Screenshots von tollen Sonnenuntergängen zuzutexten.

#Ein Freund von mir sagt immer wieder "die Grafik sieht schon cool aus". Ja herzlichen Glückwunsch, dann spiele ich lieber ModernWarfare, da sieht die noch besser aus.
Wenn das heute das Maß der Dinge ist, dann empfehle ich jedem das Spiel zu kaufen, ihr werdet zufrieden sein.

#Es gibt vom Entwickler keine einfache Möglichkeit Inhalte für das Spiel zu erstellen. Der bereit gestellte "Editor" ist kein Ersatz für einen vollwertigen Editor im 2D Format, wie bei Arma3. Auch wenn dieses Tool sehr fähig sein mag, so ist es nicht Anwenderfreundlich, und wenn uns die Geschichte eines gelehrt hat:

Egal wie gut etwas ist, wenn es zu kompliziert ist, scheitert es.

Payday 2 continues the fun of Payday: The Heist, but it fails at basic things and introduces many bugs, crashes, messed up AI behavior, advertised community goodies.

Some facts:

1.
Payday 2 uses a skill-tree to specialize your avatar (your player). You can choose from different skillsets, combine them without limitation. So you can create a ghost-warrior type char and some other uncommon, but fun to play combos.

2.
The available weapons are highly customizeable, however you can not purchase the custom parts for your weapons directly, but you have to do a lot of missions to even get a basic set of weapon attachements.

To get them: All you need is luck. No skill, not much money, no doing special stuff - just plain old luck.
If you complete a heist you may choose one out of three cards.
Each card provides an addon for one of your weapons, a mask or a spray color for your mask. (Yeah, thats right, you may select the hardest hardcore heist and your reward will be a can of yellow spraypaint.

Actually there is quite a low chance of getting an useful addon for your weapons, and an even lower chance of getting the addon you need.
Getting the medium silencer for one of the many pistols over an over again is not funny at all. It´s frustrating at best.
There simply is no blackmarket to buy the part you need. just the missions to get a single random thing - most of the time a spraypaint for your mask. Epic (not really).
So you got millions in your account, but nowhere to spent it. Just like Bitcoin.

3.
Selecting a mission is a pain in the a** : You switch to "Crime Net", your online heist planning hotspot to select a mission. A new Mission on the city map pops up every two seconds. To play a mission matching your and your buddies skill level (which would be Overkill/Deathwish after a few hours played) is a plain waiting game. If you want to play a specific heist, it´s possible to wait 10+ minutes for the heist to be available.
This time you actually can "buy" the heist. Yes, thats right, you pay millions of in-game money to attend to a heist.
e.g.
heist cost: 4 million.
Reward if completed: 5 million
Just...great. (not really)

4.
the A.I.

Your A.I. teammates are dumb like a rotten potato. They are not able to interact with items, they can not carry loot, items, tools, ammo etc.
Basically they are mobile sentry units with the patent pending "Step-in-the-line-of-fire(tm)" feature built in. They will spent most of the time right in front of you and your rifle´s barrel, effectively blocking your line of sight and intercepting any bullet you might want to send downrange.
So it´s best to just switch them off since they are no use at all in fact. You can not even select the gear to use for them.

5.
Bugs, glitches, "features"

I)
Quite often security guards walk right through walls or closed windows. Sometimes they notice you and set of the alarm caused by this glitch.

II)
There is a mission called "Rats". Your mission operator "Bains" is going to help you by providing hints and intel to complete the job.
He is telling you the sequence (randomized order) of components used to cook some meth. okay, but he also has no clue - so he checks with "the internet" to get it right. He tells you after quite some time which one of the ingredients to use first. You actually have to wait until he repeats his advise for the second or third time, because it may change. If you put it in to early, the lab just explodes. This repetition however is not intended by the game. It is propably just a misplaced event trigger.
By the way: You can not just repeat the steps to cook more meth, you have to wait for Bain´s inspiration to get the "right" order of chemicals to use.

If you are incapacitated by police or other opponents you can be revived by your teammates. If you got real teammates, it is just no problem at all. If they can get to you, you can and will be saved.
If A.I. is your helping hand, it´s a different story. A.I. approaches you, starts reanimation 0%...50..60,70...80%...and...A.I. backs of for no reason, just to restart the reanimation a second later again. Starting at 0% of course.

To open locked security doors or gates you will need a drill. The drill tends to fail after a few seconds of operation. So you need to fix it. It is intended that way - but, the weaker a lock is, the faster the drill fails.
A drill will fail 2-4 times on a lock holding 300 seconds, and it will fail 2-4 times on a lock holding just 20 seconds. Thats just poor design.

Some of the skills from the skill tree simply do not work.
There is a skill to get full resistance to Taser(tm) hits. You invest in this skill, but the Taser(tm) police units just tase you anyway. No effect at all and no patch fixing it.

6. Community goodies provided by the game dev.

Many, if not most of the items and heists you can find in Payday 2 are actually paid DLC content. If you do not buy the weapon DLC, you will find yourself with low powered weapon stats with almost no useable addons. So, to play the game you are forced to buy the DLCs or it will be frustrating to fire your weapons.
Weapon stats are way off in most cases. E.g. many 9mm pistols do more damage than a G36 or AK type rifle per shot. It´s also possible to have a pistol with simple iron sights being more accurate and powerfull than a good combat rifle with scope and sniper stock.
The free community DLC stuff however is "in development". The Dev studio rewards players within the Steam Payday 2 game group with free stuff for Payday 2 if the group reaches 1 million, 1.5 mil and so on members. Most of these "rewards" are currently "in development", even though the group already passed the mark to get this free addon.
Of course, the paid DLCs are always on time.

Don´t get me wrong on this:

Payday 2 is a fun game to play, if you play with your mate, friends, buddies - in short people you know, the game is really fun for the first days you play it. But once you got many skills, and leveled up to ~70 (100 is currently max.) You will see the problems listed above. You will feel the frustration if you got the green paint for your mask over and over again, while missing the basic things your gear needs.

My recommendation is: Get the game if there is a special sale/discount giving you the game WITH all DLCs. The game without DLCs is worth nothing at all, it´s just frustrating to play with a basic set of things.

However: If you got all addons and content for Payday 2 and if you are willing to ignore some of the well known bugs and problems, it will give you a lot of fun and put a smile on your face for hours while watching the helmets flying :-)

Conclusion: Do I recommend this game? I have to say no, because the game comes without the cool stuff. The cool stuff is found within the paid DLC addons. So I would recommend the game with DLC, but not without.