Game Review - Payday 2

This game is essentially Payday: The Heist but improved - what a sequel should be.

Payday is a FPS in which the aim is to perform certain tasks in order to complete missions, earn XP and Cash to spend on weapons/skills to improve your character. The missions are usually heist with a certain theme like robbing a bank or creating and collecting meth. The more you create/steal/get away with the more money you get. These can be a one off job or a multi in game day jobs that require lots of covering crashed escape vehicles, doing multiple objectives or transporting goods through multiple zones. There is also varying degrees of difficulty to support those newer to the series or who want training.

The heists are performed by 4 male characters - Hoxton, Dalas, Chains and Wolf in Washington DC. These can either be AI and you, or multiplayer online with friends or strangers. The gameplay is similar to the original but with some mechanics improved and all round glossed up to improve how smooth the game runs. The AI as usual is difficult when they are with you and  when you are against them their level of capability is equivalent with the difficulty, varying from blind, headless chickens with guns to terminators. Since I am used to the Payday mechanics I went straight in with some harder games until I came to a large difficult heist with level 50+'s. For me this was the best way to learn the way the specific heist worked so I used their methods and gained a massive 7 level ups and $500,000 to my upgrades. The stealth option of sneaking the back way and destroying cameras etc. has been improved to be more forgiving (actually possible) from the first game. The actual weapons and objectives have also become more realistic (loot bags weigh you down, recoil is a bigger issue) to improve the game further.

The graphics are decent, nothing too insane but nothing too basic either. However I game into a problem where on standard HD resolution (1920x1080) the game still had a black box around the edge of the game (quite large actually) which confused me as most games don't have this issue. The gun detail is on the same standard as the original which confused me as it's not that great, not up to scratch with CoD or Battlefield guns, however I doubt this had the same budget, and I'd much rather it was spent on the gameplay rather than graphics. As story goes there isn't much other than the backstory behind the heists and the story running through the heist. It is quite interesting though for the little there is, however this is a game that does not resolve around story so that can be forgiven.
  All in all this is a pretty good game, much better than is predecessor, but not quite as good as I think it could be with a little work and some story to go with it, the replayability  factor would be even higher. 7/10