An absurdly massive game full of things to do and things to play with. A true heisting simulator filled with memes and genuinely cool stuff. A bloated mess. A game in desperate need of a third entry.

Payday 2 is a lot of things, but at its price, all you can really say is "it's worth it".

Doing heists, both in "loud" and stealth, is always fun, and playing with random people can still definitely be fun. You don't need friends for this co-op experience.
There's a massive amount of customization both in terms of loadouts and the look of your heister. There are skill trees as well that give you abilities to do various things, whether its supporting your team, doing dumb stuff, or putting out massive amounts of damage for free.
You can easily stack 500 hours into this game (as I have) and still find more things to do. I can't guarantee all of it will be as rewarding or intriguing as the early experience is, but I can say this game is definitely worth picking up (I don't have any of the Silk Road Collection DLC either; this is all "basegame" content; (a lot of it used to be DLC, it's a long story)).
These days, late game suffers from massive content bloat and general lack of viability of a lot of builds on the higher difficulties. In addition, there's so much that it can easily overwhelm a new player; a third entry from the ground up would be a much better pick than this game.
I give this game a thumbs up, both because you should buy it AND because it deserves it's third entry so badly. It's in development right now, so be on the lookout for that in the coming years.

An absurdly massive game full of things to do and things to play with. A true heisting simulator filled with memes and genuinely cool stuff. A bloated mess. A game in desperate need of a third entry. Payday 2 is a lot of things, but at its price, all you can really say is "it's worth it". Doing heists, both in "loud" and stealth, is always fun, and playing with random people can still definitely be fun. You don't need friends for this co-op experience. There's a massive amount of customization both in terms of loadouts and the look of your heister. There are skill trees as well that give you abilities to do various things, whether its supporting your team, doing dumb stuff, or putting out massive amounts of damage for free. You can easily stack 500 hours into this game (as I have) and still find more things to do. I can't guarantee all of it will be as rewarding or intriguing as the early experience is, but I can say this game is definitely worth picking up (I don't have any of the Silk Road Collection DLC either; this is all "basegame" content; (a lot of it used to be DLC, it's a long story)). These days, late game suffers from massive content bloat and general lack of viability of a lot of builds on the higher difficulties. In addition, there's so much that it can easily overwhelm a new player; a third entry from the ground up would be a much better pick than this game. I give this game a thumbs up, both because you should buy it AND because it deserves it's third entry so badly. It's in development right now, so be on the lookout for that in the coming years.