Co-op Gaming in Eyefinity: Payday The Heist

Welcome to the first of my video blogs where I look at co-op games and how satisfying the experience is in multi-monitor. I love co-op gaming, but not all co-op games play well in multi-monitor. My reviews cover what I needed to do to get the game working in Eyefinity, any issues that I found in the game that relate to it, and how fun I found the whole experience.

This episode reviews the game Payday: The Heist.

In case it is helpful, I have provided a text copy of the transcript as well. Enjoy!

This is my first blog about co-op gaming in Eyefinity, and although I use Eyefinity personally, this also applies to Nvidia Surround and the Triplehead2Go etc.

Now I'm the type of gamer who prefers co-op gaming to deathmatch multiplayer for a few reason. One is that I usually suck at deathmatch and secondly I prefer working as a team to achieve something.

Today's blog is about the game Payday: The Heist. If you haven't heard of it, it's a game about being money-hungry thieves who rob banks or drug dealers, and inevitably the police get involved.

There are currently only 6 levels but this game is all about replayability. It's almost impossible to beat some of the harder levels without having played the first couple of levels a few times to level up your weapons, armour, and deployable items. Fortunately, levelling up is fast and attempting to get achievements along the way means this does not feel like a grind.

In each level, there are a series of tasks to complete, such as retrieving keys from people or setting up equipment to get to new areas on the map. The equipment your group uses always seems to have some failure to repair along the way, which forces extra teamwork to cover the people who need to do this. In between all this, you get loads of cops turning up to stop you, and how you work as a team determines how easy your life is going to be to achieve your goals. There are different types of police to test you, from simple heavy armour to shields and tazers who can force teammates to come to your rescue. You can also tie up civilians and trade them for your teammates in the event that they get captured or killed by the cops.

I normally play 2 person co-op, and this game is definitely fun in 2 player mode, but it is even more fun in 4 players as it means you can attempt more achievements, plus there is nothing more enjoyable than giving your mates a hard time when everything goes terribly wrong. (Crackerjackmack, I am looking at you.)

So let's look at how the game performs in multi-monitor. The good news is that it works straight out of the box. You don't need to apply any patches or fixes to get this to work. The menus are all easy to navigate, with only one flaw. With bezel correction, the weapon and deployables selections are half hidden behing my middle and right screen bezels. This means I just have to click around until I hit the button I want. If you had a Triplehead2go, you could always disable bezel management for this step and then re-enable it for gameplay. But considering this is only minor problem, it's no big deal.

The only other issue we had was the odd occasion where one person couldn't join someone else's game, but fortunately this is rare and if the person having the issue hosted instead, we could all get in and have some fun.

Payday: The Heist is definitely not the most polished game out there graphically, the storylines won't win any awards, and some of the achievements seem impossibly difficult, but I found myself playing it again and again and again.
It's highly addictive and I always have a massive smile on my face after playing with friends.

So in summary, this game is right up there as one of the most enjoyable co-op games I have played in Eyefinity. Be sure to pick it up for 20 bucks or less when it's on sale, and you'll have a great time with friends that you won't regret.

I give it a 9 out of 10.