Station to Station is exactly what it says on the tin: a minimalist and relaxing game about building railway connections and moving things from station to station. You’ll pour hours into building stations and connecting buildings to then transport your goods to a city, all while bringing life back to the world's desolate landscapes. It’s incredibly simple in premise, but it’s astoundingly fun once you get stuck in. 

Regardless of your relationship with world-building simulators or anything that relies on resource management in general, Station to Station is a must-play for anyone looking for a relaxing experience. If you’ve played games like Before We Leave, Islanders, and Terra Nil, you’ll be familiar with the routine of finding out what you have to do, and then planning the best way to complete the task, but what separates it from these games is the extreme lack of feeling pressured due to resource management and instead the emphasis on working at your own pace.  

Bring me to life

To start out, the map feels a little on the small side, since it’s just a square with a handful of buildings scattered across. As you begin connecting wheat farms to mills, then mills to bakeries, Station to Station hints at the complexity to come as it gently holds your hand while teaching you how to place stations and tracks. It’s an essential step, but once complete you’ll have a firm understanding of the game and the intricate systems that underpin it.

As you begin to breathe a new life into these landscapes and connect each building through your railways, the color starts to return, and the music starts to swell as both a visual and auditory representation of your progress. I love adaptive music within games that require you to build from the ground up since it feels far more rewarding than just being given a sticker at the end of the level and told 'good job', and it’s something Station to Station excels in. You feel proud of the work you’ve done as the world springs to life, and it’s enough motivation alone to push you through to the next level. 

To keep the experience exciting, Station to Station hosts six different biomes to bring to life too, so when you feel like you’ve exhausted one, you can move on to the next and encounter entirely new cities and requirements in fresh settings. Plus, each new biome is home to a new creature to locate across the map, like horses for plains, camels for deserts, all of which you can zoom right in on - which I might’ve spent more time doing than I like to admit, but in my defense, this was required for a few levels so that’s my excuse. 

Although there is a little room for error, you are free to completely restart levels or from a checkpoint if you realize you’ve misplaced or connected a rail that would be better off elsewhere. I don’t usually go back and correct myself when I notice I make an error like this, but the lax nature of Station to Station helps you feel like there are no real consequences if you do have to retrace your steps a little bit, so there’s no shame in feeling like you might benefit from doing so. Even if you just want to organize things a bit neater, it feels like an integral part of the game to go through this process rather than feeling like you’re going back on yourself. 

The train keeps a-rollin' 

The only real restriction in Station to Station is your money. Placing stations and laying tracks isn’t free, and you will eventually run out of funds if you’ve been busy creating roller coaster-style railways for your freight trains to enjoy on their commute. But, you will always start with an ample amount to get set up, and the second you start producing things like bread and cheese, you’ll start to make money again. This emphasizes the importance of planning, which the game revolves around, and then goes back to my point about how restarting from checkpoints is part of the process rather than a retracing of steps. 

In addition to this, each level comes with two optional challenges for those who like a little more structure. One usually revolves around finances, challenging you to end a level with a certain amount left to your name, and the other will be more of a wildcard. You’ll be challenged to create rails that run for 2000m or cross three times, generally, just things that will require you to be a little more creative with your placements, but they are fun objectives to try and meet if you do struggle with just being told to build a network and left to your own devices. 

Let off some steam 

The freedom Station to Station provides you with to just build as you please is what I think makes the game so appealing. You don’t have to place things on specific tiles or against certain blocks, just as long as you can connect your stations to one another, the world is your oyster. Even with optional challenges, you can still work at your own pace without any repercussions if you don’t follow a specific routine, and that is so important in a game that claims to be relaxing. 

Outside of it’s six regions, Station to Station comes equipped with a “custom game” mode, which lets you build your own maps according to your preferences, and really lets your creativity shine through. If you’re someone who doesn’t love the shackles of funds in world-building games, there’s a way to turn this off and simply build. 

With games like Terra Nil and Dorfromantik, you can feel as though one misplacement will end up with you having to begin again, whereas with Station to Station, you are more willing and more likely to find a workaround if you do realize you’ve misplaced a rail, but it doesn’t feel as enjoyment-shattering even if you do have to go back to a checkpoint and evaluate your decisions again. 

At its core, Station to Station is simply about learning to slow down and plan without feeling the limitations of deadlines or the pressure of resource management. Although its more relaxed content loop might not appeal to the action-seeking, high-stakes player, for someone looking for a game that just lets you chill, it’s a charming, unique little game that’s enough to keep you entertained for a decent chunk of time.

Accessibility 

Unfortunately, Station to Station falls a bit short on accessibility settings. If you don’t fancy playing with a mouse and keyboard, the game does have full controller support, but as for in-game accessibility, your options are limited. Keybinding and custom graphics settings, alongside the ability to change the language of your game, are about as accessible as things get, but the nature of the game and lack of narration or dialogue, in general, means there’s no need for subtitles - so it gets a pass on that.  

How we reviewed Station to Station

I played Station to Station for around 13 hours on PC using a mouse and keyboard. This was enough time for me to complete all six biomes the game offers, a handful of the optional in-game challenges, and explore the custom game mode. There are still several challenges for me to go back in and complete, which I definitely plan on doing.

For more games like Station to Station, you might want to check out the best indie games, or the best simulation games if you want to see the world from the perspective of a conductor rather than the network constructor.   

Counter-Strike 2 doesn’t care about you. Over the course of hundreds of rounds in this multiplayer first-person shooter, I’ve been shot, blown up, and burnt in ways that feel savagely unfair. But the secret is that I am barely competent at Counter-Strike 2, and Valve’s newest competitive shooter really doesn’t care about making me feel welcomed. 

If you want success, you have to earn it. Bizarrely, dropping an enemy with a well-placed headshot actually feels more satisfying because it’s just that rare to get a sympathy kill. More often than not, I spent my time with CS2 getting picked off with a single round by people with better motor skills or more hours with the game than me.

So it goes. Counter-Strike has always been viciously cruel to newcomers. As a pioneer of the one-life-per-round multiplayer shooter, the game has long been about five-on-five multiplayer matches that see combatants slowly whittled down as the round draws on. Casual game modes up the player count substantially, but that feeling of attrition as players get wiped out, littering the map with their corpses, remains.

The two teams, terrorists and counter-terrorists, fight over a bombsite or a few kidnapped hostages: opposing objectives that see one or the other team taking a defensive angle while the other tries to bust in and complete their objective. In most competitive settings, these games will all involve the bomb defusal mode, which revolves around counter-terrorists trying to hold a bomb site while terrorists try to attack it, planting the bomb and holding it for 40 seconds before it explodes, killing everyone nearby. 

War Economy 

The need to buy your weapons each time you respawn punctuates the round-by-round ultraviolence with a bit of meta-strategy, as the more powerful weapons cost more money and will require you to complete objectives and kill enemies just to pay your upkeep. The AWP, a godless killing machine that can end any player in a single hit, is so expensive that you’ll have to perform well through multiple rounds to get it, and when you die there’s a good chance the opposing team will try to scoop it up for themselves, turning it back on you in the next round. 

This is, by and large, how it has always been in Counter-Strike and very little has changed with Counter-Strike 2. Yes, there’s beautiful smoke now, and there's a subtick system that I don’t really understand that has the community divided, but in practice doesn’t seem to impact casual play too much. The M4A1-S will look a little different, but it’s the same game, remade in Valve’s Source 2 engine. This is why it’s called Counter-Strike 2 of course (if you were somehow confused as to why the fourth game in the series is numbered 2).

But if you’ve played Counter-Strike Global Offensive - the previous entry that Valve has made the baffling decision to hide away in a beta branch now, the better to replace it entirely with CS2 - then you’re still going to be good at this new entry. If you’re not, you’re going to have to bang your head against a wall made of players with better skills than you if you want to get better. 

Stick and move 

The draw is the silken movement and clean gunplay. Moving around in Counter-Strike 2 is smooth and fast. Hidden paths through the somewhat remastered maps open up for anyone able to master a crouch jump, and you’ll soon find yourself cutting through the maps at high speed. Move at full speed and you’re noisy, walk and you move slower but you’re quieter. Crouch and you’ll move incredibly slowly, but make nearly no noise. The slower you move, the more accurate your guns are, so you’re making a constant trade-off between moving fast and noisy and moving slow and stealthy, poised to attack.

The only time you lose that control is when you’re shot by an enemy, with the impact of bullets slowing you down, all but guaranteeing your death. Unless you kill your attacker first. This is a simple and elegant way that CS2 pushes you, endlessly, toward violence. While several of the one-life competitive shooters will see people slowly trading damage over the course of a round, here most fights will end with someone dying as few angles provide the luxury of an escape route or a reposition while you’re moving at a snail’s pace. 

The weapons you’ll play with are diverse and interesting: an MP5SD will spray down enemies up close with barely any recoil, while an M4A1-S is a long-range killing machine, providing you can manage your recoil. The buying wheel of CS:GO is gone, replaced with a Valorant-esque buying grid. There are more weapons in the game than slots to display them, so players will have to choose the weapons they’re most likely to use.

Each weapon behaves slightly differently. So despite how often it kills me, I find the AK47 unusable, though I’m capable of picking people off all day with the MP5SD or the bullet-hose P90. Both guns are more forgiving to people, like me, who haven’t yet internalized Counter-Strike 2’s golden rule: you should stop moving to fire.

While most people will be wearing armor in each fight, gunfights are still fairly brutal. The damage model isn’t as vicious as Escape From Tarkov or even Rainbow Six Siege but aiming skill is highly valued and most of the time a fight will be over in a split second, a burst of gunfire eviscerating the loser before they have time to react.

Get good or die trying  

There is, however, something compelling about this. To win even a single fight here means you’ve outplayed an opponent. To hold an angle feels heroic, reloading a tiny celebration of living another few seconds. I’ve clutched a couple of rounds, but success in Counter-Strike has always evaded me. Counter-Strike 2 is no different, but I view getting success here as aspirational; so much fun do I find the tiny conflicts that make up each round.

Sadly, I think I may be in the minority. Despite some features to make the game a little easier to learn, I think most people’s first 100 hours are going to be miserable and it’s hard to know who’s going to put all of that time in to actually get some skills. Especially when these skills will be hard-won and forged in the fires of, well, getting torn apart by talented players who have already suffered through those early hours. 

Counter-Strike 2 is an exceptional game. But it’s impenetrable and hostile to newcomers and it’s upset a lot of its existing player base by replacing a much-loved game with a newer version that will need a nicer PC for people to play and has cut out some of the beloved features from CS:GO. 

This doesn’t impact whether or not Counter-Strike 2 is a good game. It’s excellent. But the manner of its release is somewhat baffling and has meant that while I am writing the review, I’m writing this as a review of Counter-Strike 2 as it stands right now. But there’s a storm coming, and I think the version of Counter-Strike 2 that we play a year from now, six months from now, a month from now… is going to be entirely different. I hope those changes morph Counter-Strike 2 for the better.  

Accessibility

Outside of subtitles, really there’s nothing to talk about here. A poor showing.  

How we reviewed Counter-Strike 2

I played 30 hours of Counter-Strike 2, across the game’s competitive and casual modes. I also dabbled in the game’s deathmatch mode and the two vs. two wingman mode. These feel like sideshows so I didn’t spend a lot of time with them, putting an hour into each before focussing entirely on the main event, which for me is the five-on-five multiplayer. 

I spent all of the time playing on keyboard and mouse. I’m currently using Razer’s Cobra Pro, and that worked just fine here.

The best FPS games promise more high-stakes action, but the best co-op games may also be of interest for a more communal setting. 

After you’ve beat up enough jackbooted thugs in an alleyway, the brilliance of The Lamplighters League reveals itself. The turn-based strategy game comes from Harebrained Schemes, better known these days for their work on stompy mech-’em-up BattleTech, but the scuffles here couldn’t be further from BattleTech’s city-leveling conflicts. 

Here the fighting jumps from the pages of pulp adventures, where your cast of daring scoundrels biff, pow, and blast baddies in a variety of locations: a winding alleyway, a hotel in the desert, or a snowy forest. While the stakes are the same - the end goal is to save the world from a horrible fate - the methods in which you try to seize victory often involve a poison dagger, a hand grenade, or even just a pair of revolvers.

The change is a good one. Bringing the camera in close lets us see the characters, and it’s these that make The Lamplighter League shine brighter than many other entries in the turn-based tactics genre. The writing is top-notch here, and characters will react to each other's triumphs and mishaps with lines that hint at the growing relationships between the rogue’s gallery that join you on missions.

While the mechs that inhabit Harebrained Schemes’ BattleTech are sterile and unknowable, these heroes are the beating heart of The Lamplighter League. 

Lamped 'em

Some smart design decisions mean you’ll often rotate the agents you take on missions, particularly because when a character is downed they’ll often need time to recover. However, you’ll mostly switch up your A-team operatives regularly because every character is brilliant, hewn roughly from archetypes you might see in any tale of derring-do. The Lamplighters League makes itself clear early when you start with the stealthy Lateef, punchy Ingrid, and pistol-toting Eddie, but I was most fond of Ana Sofia, who gets a ton of killer voice lines, is well-acted, and also has a submachine gun despite her official role of team healer. 

In play, most of these characters will feel distinct. Ingrid is a close-range behemoth, with the ability to dance through a crowd of enemies, knocking one over as it hits the wall before pirouetting into the middle of a brawl to unleash her ultimate ability; a sweeping leg and a high roundhouse kick, damaging everything around her. Eddie can put out a nearly unlimited amount of damage with his revolvers, and every character has their own “engine”, a unique mechanic that lets them be good at the thing they’re supposed to be good at. 

This is classic turn-based strategy, so there’s a grid and you’ll rattle around it burning AP (each character starts with two, but it’s a fluid resource, and many buffs or skills will give characters more) to move or perform actions. Once your heroes - there’s usually three but some missions can give you more - have acted, then the enemy will take their turn. So far, so turn-based. The addition of stealth makes things a little more interesting, but stealth here isn’t a viable option for the entire game but instead a chance, Indy-style, to bop a few guards before a big scrap. 

The meta-game and size of conflicts bring to mind a different turn-based tactics game. XCOM: Chimera Squad feels like a close fit style-wise, with small-scale movement-focused warfare as you seek to stop three powerful enemies working for ultimate baddies - The Banished Court - from gaining too much power. This is represented by little gauges and as they fill up this trio will gain extra abilities and be more of a pain in your behind. So, you juggle missions to try and keep them from gaining too much power, and then you take the fight to them with a mission that knocks them off the board entirely. If you’ve seen this before in XCOM 2’s stellar War of the Chosen expansion, no you didn’t.  

Sadly, the push and pull of this in addition to the several different resources you need to keep on top of to upgrade your weapons or healing abilities while also recruiting new members to the League, means that the metagame is often the most stressful part of the experience. There are just a lot of urgent issues that need your time and attention and while this does create tension it often goes right past that, until it’s something akin to the game smacking you upside the head, demanding you to make an impossible choice. 

This will keep you engaged - especially when these demands start forcing you to go toe to toe with the dangerous scions just so you can delay their plans a little, even at the cost of your own agents - but it’s at odds with the rest of the game which is mechanically lightweight.

Still, there’s a strong chance if you’re into strategy games you’ll find something to love with The Lamplighters League, even if, due to the lack of replayability, you’ll probably only enjoy it once. 

 Accessibility features

Subtitles and a few graphics options are your lot here. You can change the opacity of text boxes and change the size of text boxes if needed, but there’s very little else on offer. However, due to its turn-based nature, this may be enough accommodations for many.  

 How we reviewed The Lamplighters League

I played The Lamplighter League for 20 hours, which was enough to wrap up around two-thirds of the game’s story. I did this with a keyboard and mouse and think it would be better to do it that way. 

I’ve played a lot of turn-based tactics games, and have reviewed the likes of XCOM 2, Jagged Alliance 3, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, and XCOM Chimera Squad. I beat XCOM 2 on Legendary without losing a single soldier, which doesn’t impact my review but isn’t something I can brag about usually so give me my moment, yeah?  

Want something with more depth? There are plenty of options in our list of the best PC strategy games. 

Paleo Pines starts with the traditional formula of a farming simulator, immediately handing you some derelict land to call home and placing you amongst an entirely new town to explore, but introduces a new element as its unique selling point: dinosaurs. There’s going to be no collecting cows and chickens, or riding around the town on the back of a horse, here; you’re armed with a huge variety of Cretaceous and Jurassic helpers. 

It’s certainly a quirk within the genre, and it's a great basis to set itself apart from what is starting to feel like an oversaturated market of games with the same mechanics and content. However, despite its obvious oddity, there’s something about developer Italic Pig’s Paleo Pines that still glistens with familiarity and raises the question of whether its inhabitants are enough to set it apart from the competition.  

Rise and grind 

You start your time with Paleo Pines by creating your character, immediately promoting a sense of ownership and personality, rather than just picking from a series of preset avatars like older Story of Seasons or Harvest Moon games would have you do.

Armed with your first dinosaur, a blue parasaurolophus called Lucky whom the central story revolves around, you’re soon introduced to some of Paleo Pines’ quite humorous inhabitants and their dino companions. They quickly share their surprise with Lucky, who is apparently an incredibly rare species since the other parasaurolophus’ has gone missing, and it becomes your main aim to uncover their whereabouts. However, before you set off on this adventure, you need to visit your new ranch. 

Your land is entirely abandoned with a lot of debris to clean up from the get-go. If you’ve played any Story of Seasons or Stardew Valley, this won’t be breaking news. This process is the backbone of farming sims, but it’s still the best way to get you familiar with getting set up on your farm and getting familiar with the space. But although it is an essential step, it feels like there’s not much of an attempt to shake things up and make them more unique or exciting, so it ends up feeling pretty long-winded when you’re just desperate to jump in and start collecting dinosaurs.

Your stamina also depletes incredibly quickly, as does Lucky’s, so days will be pretty short if you’re spending more time on your farm than you are walking around and meeting the townsfolk. I always find the stamina to be one of the downfalls of farming sims since so much is expected of you each day, be it through crop cultivation, mining, or clearing up your land, and there aren't many obvious pointers within the game to help you know how to replenish this. 

Eventually, you can somewhat automate your farm depending on which dinosaur species you keep around - incredibly useful if you don’t want to waste your own stamina cultivating crops. Each species comes with its own perks, such as the triceratops which helps till multiple squares at once, or the velociraptor which helps harvest crops once fully grown, however, you will find clearing your space and getting to grips with the taming process can become quite the timesink. 

Same old same old 

Even though you’ve got the excitement of dinosaurs to play with, the day-to-day routine is still pretty rigid. You wake up, water any crops you’ve got growing, and try to clear as much space as possible as you get started. Unfortunately, Paleo Pines doesn’t offer much to shake things up from this traditional routine as you get set up, but at least you’ve got a spare pair of talons to help out. 

Lucky is your key to getting things cleared since their presence basically grants you a secondary stamina bar, but you’ll also need to rely on it as a mount if you prioritize getting places quickly. Taking the size of the map into account as well, you’ll probably want to consider this once you start straying from home territory.

However, you can’t rely exclusively on Lucky to help you around the farm. You’ll learn to rely on a variety of old tools pretty quickly, like a shovel and a hoe which will help you get the farming side of things set up. You’ll also get gifted a few packs of seeds so you can start to get some income, but this takes time to set up and feels like a drip feed if you stick to one crop type. 

The journal does help keep things slightly more exciting though, and you’re able to take on quests for the townsfolk to keep your daily adventure more productive alongside following the main story. These tasks usually revolve around collecting certain foragable items or growing specific crops for a recipe. They’re fairly passive quests, and the freedom to do what you want makes the experience feel a lot more relaxing, but it’s nice to have the option to follow a little more structure. 

Dinos for days

Where the game does shine is through it’s dinosaur interaction sections where you can really get to grips with the critters that sold you the game in the first place. However, it’s not as easy as walking into a store and purchasing new dinosaurs to add to your journal and ranch. Instead, a creature-collecting element is introduced, and with nothing but a flute to attract their attention you’re tasked with befriending and logging your experience with said creatures in a Pokemon-esque fashion. 

Across the large map, you’ll come across what feels like hundreds of species of dinosaurs that spawn in the overworld, and once you’ve got settled into the town you’ll be free to go and wrangle as many as you can home on your ranch. These species will spawn in the same place each day, so if there’s a certain dinosaur you want to collect then you’ll know where to head without being sent on a wild goose chase. But while this sounds pretty mundane and repetitive, there’s still an exciting addition to the collection element. 

Rather than offering the same dinosaurs with the same patterns and colors each day, there’s a chance you’ll encounter new variations, some boasting a different ‘rarity’ to more common designs, almost like the Paleo Pines equivalent to shiny Pokemon. They don’t boast any sort of skill or stat boosts, but they are neat to look at. Your journal is the key to logging each color pattern and nature, which is why it’s essential to keep exploring even when you feel satisfied with your collection. 

But, as easy as it is to befriend these beasties, it’s much more challenging to care for them. Rather than a traditional farming simulator that will have you throwing wheat and seeds at your animals and calling it a day, each species of dinosaur you house on your ranch has specific requirements for pen space, diet, and living preferences which you need to keep in mind if you don’t want them to get upset because they will leave your ranch. 

If you’re a superfan of dinosaurs and farming simulators, Paleo Pines is a dream come true. It’s relaxing and brimming with cute critters, yet still offers structure when you need a little more story to follow during your day-to-day, but it’s hard to shake the close comparison to other farming simulators despite these differences.  

Accessibility 

Accessibility settings within Paleo Pines include features such as turning off the general blur, and the ability to increase text size for dialogue boxes, but this is done through a simple yes/no option rather than a slider to completely personalize it to your preference. Character speed can also be slowed down through this menu, alongside high contrast mode.

Although accessibility settings already offer numerous features to toggle, a number of in-game elements have been curated with accessibility in mind without the need for an additional menu. 

For example, visual cues have been implemented within the game by default for sections such as analyzing dinosaur friend calls rather than just relying on the audio, and the colors used as these bubbles have been selected to take into account color blindness, as shared to Twitter and Steam by Italic Pig. 

How we reviewed Paleo Pines 

I’m not a stranger when it comes to farming simulators. I’ve spent what I can only assume are thousands of hours watering crops, tilling soil, and fawning over chubby-looking animal sprites in the hopes that I can make enough money for another bag of seeds. So, I’m confident in calling myself a farming simulator aficionado and knowing what makes such a game worth checking out. 

I played Paleo Pines for around 25 hours on PC with a mix of mouse and keyboard and controller, completing pages of quests and collecting numerous dinosaurs to add to my ranch. I’ve explored the map, met its cast of characters, and befriended a huge array of dinosaurs across each season and period in the game. After completing almost a year of in-game time, I got incredibly familiar with its routine and learned how to optimize my farm to make each day as productive as possible. 

For more adventures like Paleo Pines, you might want to turn your attention toward the best indie games. However, we've also got a list of the best story games if you want something slightly more narrative-driven. 

Forget about the tense stealth and bombastic firefights that punctuate first-person shooter Payday 3, the heist-shooter is actually a game about logistics. Each level has you casing up a building full of items that need to be put in bags and then moved to a waiting transport. Chuck enough of these bags - in an ideal world you’ll want all of them but that’s not required - to safety and you’ll escape too, getting a cut of the heist for your troubles. 

Really you’re just a house mover with military firepower. But it’s this constant need to keep an eye on things that sets Payday 3 apart from shooter contemporaries and marks it as an actual heist sim, delivering on the fantasy of being a bank robber and taking on bespoke, high-risk heists. 

Most of Payday 3’s best moments focus on your loot being moved too. Complete a stealth run of the game’s first level, the Secure Capital bank, and one or two of your four-man team will be walking bags calmly, as civilians, to the van idling in the parking lot, an entire vault’s load of cash being moved out under the watchful eye of the pathologically inattentive guard. In another context, chucking bags of cocaine and jewelry out of a penthouse window to the balcony below while gunfire explodes off of every surface is a different tension but creates the same feeling of elation as the daisy chain of loot slowly makes its way to a waiting helicopter. 

Every heist in Payday 3 has unique mechanics, and most of them are entirely drill-free, which is excellent for players who hated spending the entirety of their time with Payday 2 sick of listening to the wail of a drill that needs repairing. You’ll still drill the occasional lock, but now you’re most often using thermal lances, thermite, or the low-tech method of just straight up picking a lock or cracking a safe instead.  

Criminal empire 

There are three different approaches to Payday 3, and if you’re rumbled or you have no patience you’ll likely fall back on the loud and proud approach, which has you strapping on your mask and cutting loose with the game’s arsenal. Payday 3’s weaponry feels somewhat truncated - there are only two shotguns, for example - but most of the guns are fairly satisfying and each has detailed customization options. You can equip attachments to make your gun handle differently, and also paint it a matching color to your mask, should you prefer. 

Shootouts are often close-range affairs and see you spraying weapons from the hip as you move from room to room. While there are marksman rifles and snipers, the opportunity to use them feels fairly limited due to the fact special enemies can disable solo players, meaning that if you’re hiding out on a sniper perch you’re opening yourself up to being tazed or bashed upside the head by the terrifying cloakers - invisible enemies that ambush you like something out of a horror game. So, you’ll be primarily pushing around enclosed urban spaces, and I found I quickly had an affinity for the shotgun and submachine guns, which both allowed me to make a small area very undesirable to opponents.

Not that they’d realize - the AI is of middling to low intelligence and will often charge you with the self-preservation instincts of a TikToker that has just heard of a hot new way to die and wants to try it out for themselves.

The other two approaches are variations on the same stealthy theme. There’s a social stealth that plays out a little like Hitman, as you have no mask, and you’re just skulking around in public areas and testing the boundaries of restricted zones while trying to avoid cameras and guards. Then there’s the mask-on, gun-out stealth. This’ll feel familiar to players of Payday 2 and mostly involves strolling around maps cuffing civilians and taking out guards to answer their radios. You also have unlimited cable ties in this game, because hostage management is a larger part of the process.  

Little hand says it’s time to rock and roll 

Stealth feels much easier compared to Payday 2 which personally works for me. A perfect stealth heist in Payday 2 was nearly impossible unless you were super coordinated, but here it feels like you can easily lock down rooms by bursting into them with a gun. It’s fairly forgiving but that accessibility does make it feel less rewarding. 

However, you’ll want to follow the stealth path as much as possible because, well, it’s easier and can net you more money, but it’s also where you’ll get to see most of Payday 3’s improvements over its predecessor. Seven of the eight heists included in the base game can be stealthed from end to end, and while the Secure Capital bank of the first level is a fairly mundane heist compared to what comes later, each of these seven has a fascinating path you can carve through the level on your way to getting the loot. 

The shooting is, by comparison, fairly uninteresting and feels like a punishment for getting the stealth route wrong. The full-auto weapons are nearly constantly out of ammunition as the ammo pools are quite limited and it’s hard to get enough ammunition to keep them fed - so it feels like there’s a strong case to use the marksman rifles or shotguns. Except that there’s only one pump action shotgun and the double-barrelled shotgun seems like it doesn’t have the ability to put out as much damage as you need with the swarm of police. 

Unlike previous games in the series, Payday 3 can be played and enjoyed as a solo or duo player. The bots wisely stay outside hanging out during the stealth sections, but are competent partners during firefights and will chuck down bags of ammo, health, or armor when needed in addition to reviving you and doing what they can in firefights. It’s still a better game with a coordinated group of four players, but it isn’t a deal breaker in the way it is for many of these four-player co-op games.

I think Payday 3 is a solid foundation and given the decade the team worked on Payday 2 there’s no reason to believe that this game won’t also become stuffed with DLC, licensed content, and new heists until it’s a veritable paradise for would-be heisters. However, as it stands there’s just not enough game here and what there is feels a little less enjoyable than Payday 2, despite the extra polish. The game shipping with eight heists and being completable on the normal difficulty in just a few short hours left me feeling a bit cold.

But hey, at least they got rid of that stupid offshore account thing, so the cash you rake in from the heists is all yours to spend on silly masks.

Accessibility features  

There’s no dedicated accessibility menu, but there are toggle options for things like crouching or aiming down sights, while there’s also something to reduce weapon sway. 

There are colorblind options for those with protanomaly, deuteranomaly, and tritanomaly, with a slider to scale the assists up or down depending on sensitivity. This is accompanied by a series of different images so you can see what’s changing in real-time. 

 How we reviewed Payday 3

I played Payday 3 for 20 hours, tackling every heist in the game. I completed several heists in full stealth on normal difficulty but was unable to manage this in the harder difficulties. I also played with four or five of the different weapons in the game, and played solo, with another player, and in a four-man team.  

If you enjoy the Payday series, you might want to check out the best FPS games, or the best co-op games for an experience to share.