Payday 2: Crimewave Edition

PayDay 2 has a lot of great things going for it. The progression is so well done, the missions are fun and hectic, the skill trees are very customizable and the sheer amount of content is impressive. The only drawback to all of this is that it can really only be enjoyed playing online with others.

Tremendous fun.

What this game brings is something that remains startlingly elusive in the modern canon: a co-op experience that genuinely requires you to work together. For a wildly violent first-person shooter, Payday 2 sure does promote a heartwarming spirit of unity.

While not as innovative as it once was in the current gaming landscape, Payday 2: Crimewave Edition is the definitive Payday experience on consoles that will provide hours of multiplayer fun.

Lack of a concrete story and various unpolished dimensions of the game lend poorly to its overall conception, however underneath its faults and beyond the connection and host issues, Payday 2: Crimewave Edition is a solid experience with tons of hours to invest in the progression system.

The best version of a still great online co-op shooter. [Sept 2015, p.104]

Great game when it works like it should – but is that a disclaimer we should really tolerate?

Payday 2 is not without issues on consoles. Patient gamers will undoubtedly spend many hours robbing, shooting and killing hostages. The technical side still requires a bit of work, but hopefully developers will manage to eliminate most of the problems with net code.

A wealth of content to keep you busy, but you need a good group of like-minded, hardened criminals in order to make the most of it.

PAYDAY 2: Crimewave Edition has a lot of wasted potential. It's a fun game to play with your friends, but unfortunately the online mode does not work properly, as it contains too many bugs and lag to enjoy the game as you should.

Payday 2: Crimewave Edition isn’t broken to the point of being unplayable, but it has just enough issues to make it annoying.

It’s fun to play the role of the bank robber and assemble a crew of thieves. It's not the greatest game nor the worst, so if you've never experienced any of it, it might be one to try. If you have, then you aren't missing much here, except for maybe a few new cool masks.

The good thing about Payday 2: Crimewave Edition is despite the shortcomings, playing the online co-op with actual people makes the game that much more enjoyable and will stick with the original review’s statement of this being an online experience.

A game with great potential, heavily hindered by some serious technical problems. Overkill Software did nothing to improve the original game's lacklustre A.I., while one month after release it still is almost unplayable online due to very frequent disconnects and errors.

If everything was working correctly, the Xbox One version would be on par with the PlayStation 4, but pervasive technical difficulties ultimately undermine it. More than two weeks into the review, we were still experiencing crippling lag in the Crime.net mission select screen, and when missions do load we had a less than 10 percent success rate in joining the matches. Your only bet to have a stable experience playing Payday 2 on Xbox One currently is to set up your own heist and invite friends.