Well, I just have to disagree.While I agree that that the strongest point is the characterization and character development are the main draw of the series, the setpieces are quite great, worthy of some of the best heist movies. Cinematography is also quite good on both, and I think what they did with Dog Days worked very well with the setting. I do admit that the shooting and cover mechanics on Dead Men were a bit janky, but I think they fixed it pretty well on the sequel. It works great and it's smooth.
Multiplayer basically made Payday The Heist before Payday The Heist. I spent more than 60 hours on the multiplayer of the first one. It had a kind of emergent multiplayer gameplay that was not common at the time. Dog Days expanded on it and became even better.
Reading notes and listening to audio logs is lazy storytelling, imo. Well, most of the time anyways.They are very oddly placed on most games, without any kind of real logic or sense to it, they are just there to give some lazy exposition.
If there isn't a viable explanation for why you found the audiotape/note where you found and why someone would actually feel the need to record/write those specific statements, it really doesn't work. For me at least, anyways.
i guess we'll disagree on the set pieces. i played k&l1 again a couple weeks ago and it was pretty atrocious. the locations and the premise of those scenes were great, but the actual playing of them was far from it. it's clunky and stiff and there's not all that much to do anyways. the turret sequences were really awful (turret sequences always are), but also the entirety of cuba and just how every section of the game was so mindlessly played out by simply having you walk forward and shoot some stuff. i love call of duty campaigns, and it's not much different from those, except in call of duty shooting shit is fun and the scenes often make good on their premise (so like sniping evil russian weapon smuggler in chernobyl is actually super duper awesome, or shootouts in space or whatever).
the ideas are great (bank heists, prison busts, that hostage thing on that tokyo night club, all that shit is awesome), but since your options are shoot, command or cover and none of those actually feel good, i don't agree whatsoever that the game was a competent third person shooter. and i don't think it's much improved in the sequel, although i haven't played that since release, but that was my impression then. and again i think this is intended, as these are cold mostly-deranged murderers that take as little pleasure from killing as the player does. you give an order to your teammates and their answer is "fuck you", because kane and lynch is really not that much of a game as it is a "put yourself in a psycho's shoes" thing. the problem is that kane & lynch still keeps trying to play the part of a fun-ride action game, and when it doesn't have the mechanics to back it up, it ends up looking like just a really bad unexciting cover shooter, because that's all there is to it
and i'm not asking for the game to have audiologs or whatever, i'm just saying if your game's gonna be about shooting and it's gonna try not to be a fun game then maybe you shouldn't have so many scenes of "attempted fun shooting". have more kane and lynch talking, have lots of contextual prompts of you dragging hostages or doing other terrible stuff.
i'm gonna ignore the multiplayer part cos i don't play multiplayer. you might be right, i dunno/don't care tbh
edit: also i agree the visual style of 2 is nauseating in the bestest of ways. janky visuals to match the janky controls and the janky story. it just needed the correct janky scenario/encounter design. that's what i think. and i mean janky in the most complimentary of ways, actually.
Oh man, if only I could!
The amount of customization in XCOM is pretty limited unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, since if it had customization options like The Sims or something I'm fairly certain my playtime would be about 50x what it is right now
i thought there was a dlc that had that?
