Payday 2

Payday 2 puts a four-person crew through robberies of escalating ambition — smash-and-grab convenience store jobs, multi-day bank vault heists, elaborate art thefts requiring careful planning and split-second improvisation when things inevitably go wrong. Over a decade after its 2013 launch, this review sample tells two intertwined stories: a genuinely great, still-loved cooperative shooter, and one of the industry's longest, most closely tracked monetization controversies. Few games this age still receive the volume and specificity of active review commentary this one does, itself a small signal of how engaged its community remains, for better and worse, more than ten years on.

A heist loop reviewers with thousands of hours still love

The praise for the core gameplay is specific and comes from players with genuinely enormous investment. One reviewer, describing four and a half years deeply involved in the game's community, still calls it "an extremely fast-paced 4 person co-op shooter" worth recommending despite a complicated relationship with its business practices. A separate, recurring theme in this sample is the community's warmth toward newcomers — several reviewers describe near-identical experiences of joining as a low-level player among far more experienced teammates and being mentored rather than excluded, one calling it "the nicest multiplayer experience I've had in years." That's a genuinely uncommon trait for a competitive-adjacent online shooter, and it recurs often enough across this sample to treat as a real, distinguishing strength.

A decade-long monetization saga, told in the reviewers' own words

What sets this review sample apart is how thoroughly documented its central controversy is, almost entirely in the reviewers' own real-time accounts. A 2015 backlash over paid, RNG-based "drill" mechanics for unlocking weapon skins was serious enough that one long-running review tracks its own resolution directly: "Update: It appears that Starbreeze has purchased all the rights to their game and they are doing away with paid drills. This is a step in the right direction." That reversal earned real goodwill — but a separate, heavily upvoted review updated annually captures the pattern repeating: "That time of year again (and again and again), when Overkill goes over their promises." Most recently, a September 2025 update adding a subscription option alongside what one detailed reviewer calculates as a roughly 50% price increase on the game's long-running DLC bundle reignited the anger directly: "Adding a subscription to try milk a 12 year old game... it's been over a decade since most of this content was added." That reviewer concludes bluntly: "Will never be purchasing any product marred with the Starbreeze logo on it again."

A separate, more recent platform frustration

Distinct from the monetization history, a 2023 update integrating crossplay through Epic Online Services draws its own specific complaints. One detailed review, quoting Starbreeze's own official messaging directly, walks through the practical downsides reviewers report: matchmaking now routes through EOS rather than Steam directly, which some longtime players describe as reducing their control over who they end up playing with. That's a real, corroborated technical and platform concern worth knowing about separately from the pricing controversy, even though both feed into the same broader sense of eroding trust reviewers describe toward the developer's post-launch decisions, distinct from any complaint about how the underlying heists themselves actually play.

Two ways to rob a bank

Beyond the loud, guns-blazing heists that define the game's marketing, Payday 2 offers a genuine stealth alternative for most jobs, letting a coordinated crew case a location, disable cameras and guards, and complete a heist without ever triggering an alarm. Reviewers who engage with both playstyles describe them as genuinely distinct rather than a simple difficulty toggle, requiring different tools, planning and crew communication. That range is part of why reviewers with thousands of hours logged say the game still holds their attention: a single heist can play out as either a careful infiltration or a chaotic firefight depending entirely on crew choices going in, giving the same content real replay value.

What the completion data adds

Steam's achievement statistics offer a useful independent read on how deep the average player goes. Early milestones sit around 75-85% of the tracked playerbase, but that curve falls away sharply toward the game's hardest heist-specific completion achievements, several of which sit below 1%. That's consistent with a game whose earliest, most accessible content reaches a very wide audience while its hardest, most demanding heists — often tied to the newest, priciest DLC packs — are completed by only a small, dedicated core of players, a detail worth factoring into any decision about how much of the wider DLC catalogue is actually necessary to enjoy the game fully.

Where it lands

Payday 2 remains a genuinely great cooperative heist shooter at its core, with reviewers carrying thousands of hours still describing the fundamental gameplay loop and an unusually welcoming community as real, lasting strengths. Its business practices are a different story entirely — a well-documented, decade-spanning pattern of monetization controversy, partial reversal, and renewed controversy that reviewers track almost like a running diary, most recently reignited by a 2025 subscription and price-hike update. For players willing to enjoy the base game on its own terms and budget carefully around the DLC catalogue, this remains a strong recommendation; anyone specifically averse to that kind of publisher history should go in with clear eyes about exactly what they're signing up for, since the community's own long memory of these decisions makes it unlikely the underlying tension quietly disappears any time soon.