PAYDAY 3

“The missions are bland repeats of Payday 1 and 2; the game is lifeless, the missions are boring, there is no real content after 12 hours, this game sucks massive donkey ♥♥♥♥ and I hope it gets better over time, I am massively disappointed.”

“The progression system is absolutely awful; you now have to complete missions to gain XP meaning no XP from getting loot, there are three different types of missions (combat, heist and probably weapons), there is no way to search specific missions and there are over 16 pages of them, making it really boring to load up a heist and go through a bucket list of missions just to level up a bit, with a terrible grind from level 70-100.”

“Challenges are pretty dry, barebones and repetitive with most looking like 'complete x mission on y difficulty z times after an assault' or 'kill x enemies aiming down sights with y gun.' While you can still rank up to ~30ish by simply playing through each heist, I hope they add more creative challenges down the line or provide some baseline XP for completing heists.”

“The graphics look much more polished than the previous game with it being developed on unreal engine 4, but the graphics are not as good as they should be for a AAA game in 2023.”

“Although the graphics have improved compared to Payday 2, they are still underwhelming with outdated textures and bland character models, lacking detail and vibrancy expected from a modern AAA title.”

“Despite some improvements, the game feels like a downgrade from Payday 2 in every aspect except graphics; however, the graphics themselves feel outdated and mediocre, failing to push current-gen capabilities.”

“The music is bad, unenjoyable, just background noise you'll forget exists five minutes later (I had to download a jukebox mod with the Payday 2 music just to have a better time).”

“The music in Payday 3 is gold, as one would expect, but the animations and the overall game lack polish, and many fans feel the music does not match the intensity or style of Payday 2's iconic soundtrack.”

“No ability to change heists' music means the song is just the same every time! Losing the music customization from Payday 2 is a big drawback.”

“The progression system is grindy, buggy and just plain tedious.”

“Once you reached lvl 50-60 it is just about grinding specific achievements for weapons or heists that require you to complete them 15 times on a given difficulty etc. this is very frustrating and just makes you want to stop playing because you won't get a meaningful upgrade anyway.”

“The leveling system is a slow and tedious process that forces the player to level every single weapon and every single skill in addition to their own character levels in order to be able to unlock anything.”

“The game's performance sucks and is prone to randomly crashing for no reason, even on a high-end PC like a 4070 Super. It runs worse than games on the janky Diesel engine and suffers from buggy servers and heists that contribute to instability.”

“Outrageous, unacceptably bad performance with the best computer components available in 2024. The game stutters and drops frames despite high-end hardware, making it unplayable without mods and performance tweaks.”

“On a high-end system (gen3-4 M.2 NVMe drive, RTX 4070, i7 10700KF overclocked), the game still runs like an indie game from 2010 due to severe lack of optimization, causing massive frame dips, stutters, and performance issues.”

“The perk system still sucks balls because some builds are so overpowered that the rest don't matter, the armor system still sucks balls, the game is still buggy as all hell and the paid heists have objectives that don't even work a good 40% of the time, the game's performance sucks and is prone to randomly crashing on you for no reason, the UI sucks, the leveling system sucks, the servers suck, again the crashing this game has bro it's not even like it runs too terrible frame wise for me I have a 4070 super but this game will literally crash on me for seemingly no reason sometimes and I'm also chalking that up to the buggy ass servers and heists, this game is on UE and somehow runs worse than games on the janky diesel engine, I could keep going but to be honest there's a hundred videos listing all this game's issues that you could just go watch instead.”

“This game is still a scam in 2025... thought they might've fixed something with the most recent patch but nope, it's still a steaming pile of garbage held together by duct tape and hopes and dreams... wanted to give it a good chance but god what a waste of money, heists softlocking, enemies are horde shooter AI that aren't even good at being horde shooter, stealth is buggy as hell, the build variety is dead, the still has not even 1/20th the player count of Payday 2 and the fact stealth can break in so many ways and, if you happen to get a bad seed for a heist, the only way to try to get a better one is to sit through upwards of 5 minutes of matchmaking just to potentially get another trash seed or even the same exact one over and over... (I literally had this happen back to back over 20 times in a row where I left and remade a contract only to discover it was the exact same RNG every single time which instantly made me close the game when I discovered it).”

“I have over 1000 hours in PD2 and I was so excited for PD3 that I pre-ordered the Gold Edition, they got me good with that one... giant waste of money and time trying to play this sorry excuse for a sequel, it's like they decided to completely scrap the past Paydays that were so loved by the community and instead they built a heaping pile of crap in hopes of destroying the franchise, after the first week of launch they should've taken the game back off the market (which funnily happened in a sense because the first 2 weeks were so buggy you couldn't even play the game) and they should've scrapped the whole thing and rebuilt it using PD2 codes, everything from the skills to the AI in this game make it look like some indie company's first ever go at a video game it's unbelievable, lethal company, a game run and made by one person has made more consistent and better updates than this POS corporation, it pains me to even be saying this stuff because like I said, I wanted this game to be good so bad, I remember hearing rumors of its production as early as 5+ years ago and being so thrilled I couldn't contain it, this game felt like a stab in the heart when I finally got to play it and I feel like it really shows how crappy newer games have become in the past years, it seems to be an ongoing trend that older games are still the most popular which is sad but there's a reason behind it like I've said, newer games aren't made good anymore and PD3 is a prime example of that, do not buy this game under any circumstances, it's a dead game and a waste of space at this point, over a year later and it's still just as broken with no impactful fixes, thankfully they're still releasing paid DLC you have to buy before fixing their game because that's really important you give them more money.”

“Heists have zero replayability or replay value; half of them are also terrible in terms of objective design.”

“Without more heists, there just isn't enough replayability.”

“The replayability is non-existent due to lack of heist variation and no infamy system like Payday 2.”

“At this point, it's clear their only intention was to get away with a quick cash grab by releasing a less than half-baked dumpster fire of a game, then expecting us to pay even more on top of that to play the DLC that should've been included at the start or given for free after the god awful state of the game at launch.”

“Starbreeze has once again demonstrated their insatiable greed with a barrage of microtransactions and DLC packs that add little more than cosmetic fluff.”

“The grind to unlock anything meaningful is so egregiously slow that it feels like a deliberate attempt to push players towards microtransactions. It's clear the developers prioritized their cash grab over creating a balanced and rewarding progression system.”

“The main contractor, Shade, is an obnoxious, quirky woman with anger issues that will make your eyes roll back faster than she can say "Yahtzee" or remind you someone wants to "piss in your cheerios." We knew Bain/Simon Viklund was not coming back, but they arguably went for the worst possible alternative. She's not charming, not funny, not even positively memorable, and she turns your final charge into an annoying nagging session with constant f-bombs drilling your cerebellum instead of the adrenaline-pumping moment it should be.”

“This game is so unfinished and unfunny, I'm better off playing Payday 2 than this.”

“Story is very bad so far, and not funny bad.”

“Net, although I didn't like it, it and its list of heists counterpart are miles better than this terrible scroll system intertwined with a boring story.”

“Boring story”

“And the graphics… they’ve gone with this weird, almost Fortnite-like aesthetic that completely kills the atmosphere.”

“The atmosphere is gone.”

“Details that added to the atmosphere of Payday, such as the selection of your jobs in the crime net, the video clips before a job, the all-round rough look of Payday 2, that were so iconic, at least for me, are now gone.”

“If you haven't played the first one but played the 2nd, it's a fairly basic shooter that takes away a lot of the customization and RPG aspects of character development - a huge, huge regression in many regards except for the aesthetics.”

“Enhanced character development: developing the backstory and personalities of the main characters could deepen players' emotional connection to the game.”

“Story and character development: little character development.”