Lootin’ & Scootin’ In VR’s Best New Co-Op Shooter

The plan was simple: hack a code, crack a vault, lift a priceless quantum computer and get it to the helipad for extraction. We knew the route, we knew our roles. It should’ve been a cakewalk. But two minutes in, things went south, and sixty seconds later the place was swarming with cops, bullets were flying, and two of our four-player crew were down and bleeding out.

It was at that moment that a single thought ricocheted like red hot lead through the squishy meat of my mind: this game is awesome!

With Payday: Aces High, Fast Travel Games has lifted the most thrilling parts of the best heist films and combined them with the most hectic parts of the Payday series to make a truly invigorating VR Payday.

What is Payday: Aces High?

For all you dorks who have never robbed a bank, Payday: Aces High is the latest entry in the popular co-op heist series, and the first to be built from the ground up for VR. The series began in 2011 with Payday: The Heist, followed by the hugely successful Payday 2 in 2013, which sold over 40 million copies, leading to the most recent entry, Payday 3, in 2023.

As in previous Payday games, you play as a professional crook working with three other criminals to plan a heist, get the loot, and get out by any means necessary.

Aces High’s particular set of thieves are the titular Aces, a team of four heisters who have been framed for a crime they didn’t commit by the shady businessman Warren Jupiter. After five years in the slammer, they’ve broken out and made it their sole mission to systematically loot everything Jupiter owns, and to bring his empire crashing down around him.

The plot is deliberately basic, and it mostly stays out of the way for players who may not be totally interested in backstory or criminal lore. But what exposition does exist is deeply designed and presented through excellent voice acting by a talented cast of well-directed actors. Payday: Aces High may not be banking on its storytelling, but it tells a good story for those who want it.

If the plot takes a backseat, it lets the game’s great design hook take the wheel. Payday has always presented missions that can be completed in a variety of ways, and Aces High is no different. You might utilize special gadgets to quietly break and enter, hack security systems to meander through secure areas with total nonchalance, or put on a grotesque facemask and smash your way through the front doors. You can stealth your way through missions, go in guns blazing, or employ a more nuanced combination of sly wits and brute force. Whatever you choose, there’s always a way to win (and lose), and it’s this interesting quasi open-endedness that makes Payday worth playing over and over again.

What’s the (Game) Plan?

The game contains six heists at launch (a seventh free heist is already road-mapped to release in December), and each contains several sub-objectives in addition to the main score. You’ll convene with your crew in the safehouse to choose a heist, get briefed, formulate a plan, and gear up. There’s a briefing table, a lounge, a shooting range (with tons of guns), a practice area (not available in shared lobbies), a shop to buy stuff (with in-game currency, reputation, and real-world cash for cosmetics), and a character select and customization area.

Each heist is performed with four players (fairly intelligent bots fill in any unoccupied roster slots, and if a player drops mid-session they’re instantly replaced by a bot), and each can be equipped with whatever weapons, gear, gadgets, skills (earned through rep) and deployables you like. This refreshingly gives players agency and freedom that’s missing in games where classes are more rigidly defined.

Once you’ve partied up, briefed, planned, and kitted, it’s time to smash and grab. Once you’re in a heist, you’ll find a game that’s gorgeous to look at, sounds phenomenal, is deftly designed, and feels damn good.

Hands-On Heisting

Much of what’s so far been described will be familiar to Payday veterans. But what makes this particular Payday so invigorating is the immediacy brought by the hardware through which it’s experienced. If playing flatscreen Payday is watching a heist film, Aces High is pulling one yourself. It’s a visceral, lived in, cinematic experience that can only exist in a VR headset.

You’ll sling your weapon over your shoulder, pull a magazine and slam it into the gun, peek around corners and crouch under fire, manually operate your gadgets and gizmos, and physically hoist duffel bags of loot. When a teammate goes down, you grab a syringe and plunge it into their body. When you need to crack a safe, you twist the dial with your fingertips. When you’ve got to hack a terminal, you flick your wrist and tap your watch with your opposite finger. And all of this happens while ten other things are vying for your attention.

When a heist goes wrong and you’re ducking for cover behind a museum display case, bullets whirring by and glass shattering around you; when you’re shouting to a friend to grab the loot and run; when you’re rifling through papers or hacking a computer while one buddy drills through a bank vault and another holds the cops at bay by the blistering flash of an M16; there’s really nothing like it.

Payday: Aces High has a full deck of comfort settings.

Movement type can be HMD or controller, with movement and rotation vignette selectable and adjustable. Turning mode can be snap or smooth with fully customizable snap turning degrees and smooth turning speed adjustment. There are loadout presets for chair-friendly play, and primary hand can be switched left and right.

Gun reloading is among the smoothest I’ve experienced, with optional button-press mechanics to streamline things even further.

Best Laid Plans

So, it’s a very good game. But even the best of us have a few warts.

Do I wish there was more variety in the heists? Sure. Would a perfect game have more enemy types? Yes. Would objectives be a bit easier to decipher in the heat of battle? That would be nice. And while it’s true that it’s an exhilarating experience when a heist goes wrong, the fact that every heist I played went wrong at some point eventually made each run a bit predictable.

When we chatted with Fast Travel Games’ Chief Creative Officer Erik Odeldahl back in August, he told us in no uncertain terms that completing a heist using stealth (that is, triggering no alarms or firefights) is essentially the game’s de facto hard mode (there are selectable difficulty modes, too). After spending a week heisting, I doubt I’ll ever pull off a job that doesn’t involve me pulling a trigger. This could be a skill issue, I admit, but I also think that, despite the game’s inclusion of grappling hooks and other devices ostensibly made to facilitate stealth completion of heists, Payday often ends up feeling like more of a wave shooter than a burglar sim or thief puzzler.

The co-op nature of the game design is also potentially problematic. While the game’s friendly bots are well programmed and mostly do what they’re supposed to do, they can’t really replace human-controlled co-op pals. If you don’t have friends to play with you’ll be relying on strangers, bots, or playing solo.

This shouldn’t pose a major problem from a player base standpoint. Payday: Aces High is cross-play enabled and it’s included on day one for subscribers to Meta’s Horizon+ subscription service. There’s also a useful option to avoid “reported players,” which may improve the overall quality of the player pool.

But if you struggle to find a partner (or two or three) there’s no denying that Payday just isn’t as fun as a solo experience.

Payday: Aces High – Final Verdict

Why beat around the bush? I love Payday: Aces High. It’s one of the most fun VR games of the year, and an incredibly engaging experience that could only exist in VR. Planning a heist with pals and then figuring out how to stay alive when it all hits the fan is as exhilarating as any experience I’ve ever had in a headset. For shooter fans, heist film fans, or anyone craving a thrill, Payday is a must-buy.

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