A four-player crime spree across Washington DC
PAYDAY 2 puts you and three friends in the masks of Dallas, Hoxton, Wolf and Chains, working jobs around Washington DC. The CRIMENET contract database is where you pick what to hit: small convenience store jobs and kidnappings, cyber-crime, political errands, or cracking open a major bank vault. As the crew earns money and reputation, the jobs get bigger and pay better. You also get a character customization and crafting system for building your own guns and gear, plus a mask system where you choose a pattern and color for a mask of your own design.
Playing together
Up to four players co-operate on each heist. Since the jobs demand the right mix of skills, it's worth talking through who brings what before the alarm goes off. Five Skill Trees are on offer — Mastermind, Enforcer, Ghost, Technician and Fugitive — and you can mix and match between them to shape your heister. Paying attention to what the rest of the crew picked is the practical part of planning a job.
Choosing how the heist goes
Every job supports more than one approach. You can creep in on a slow stealth ambush or go in guns blazing, and each route plays out differently. The scenarios themselves stay varied too: layouts shift with random geometry and rare events turn up, so runs of the same heist don't repeat identically. Firing weapons, zip-tying civilians, and the rest of the moment-to-moment mechanics carry the action between those decisions.
Gear worth sorting out before you start
The arsenal covers sniper and assault rifles down to compact PDWs and SMGs. Once you pick a favorite, you can attach optics, suppressors, fore grips, reticles, barrels, frames and stocks, and those parts change how the weapon performs — alongside purely cosmetic touches like polished walnut grips. The game has had more than 70 updates since release, adding new heists, characters, weapons, and driving cars and forklifts. Additional content also comes through DLC, including the Infamous Collection bundle. Difficulty is adjustable, and the game supports single-player if the crew can't assemble, along with Steam Achievements, Steam Cloud saves, full controller support, and VR.