Payday: The Heist - Overdrill

Let's try something a little different, shall we? Lemme tell you a little story and something that could make you salivate.

For a game that not many people are playing because the sequel is much better...By all reports.

[size=+1]PAYDAY: The Heist - Overdrill[/size]​

I really enjoy PAYDAY but man is it a challenge of a game. It's not necessarily cheap, I just don't think I'm all that good at it. I'm not that accurate with the realistic weapons, I haven't been playing for long enough to make my character worth working with by unlocking all the really cool stuff and I've been known to make a few rookie mistakes like popping out of cover with an unloaded gun.

I'm not all that brilliant at the game but I do find it enjoyable and I do attempt to pull my weight. Even so, doing job after job to grind stuff takes a long time.

For anyone with exactly the same thought as that one, oh boy! Do I have a little tale for you!

So me and a special lady of mine are playing the game. I'd set up a job on The New World Bank, the very first level in the game. It's simple and pretty fun to fight through, so I didn't mind it being on easy for the benefit of both of us. We play for a while and then get joined by a couple more guys. We work through the job well enough until it ends.

Then, sitting in the lobby for the next game, one of these guys - let's call him 'Bob' - suggests we play through that level again, talking about a massive score hidden within the game. He spins yarns about bars of gold hidden within the level that would require a very complicated set of actions to unlock, basically maximising the amount of money we would get from this venture around 200-fold or something. Seeing as money equals XP in this game, that would mean a huge boost in levels as well as equipment and it's efficiency. That sounded good.

So, Bob starts getting us to read up on something called 'Overdrill' online to get us familiar of what's going to need to happen before then guiding us through what to do. It was kinda funny to me in a way...

Think about it: here is a game where you play as a group of theives and some guy just causally tells us about a secret vault hidden within the game that we never new about that could set our loadouts up for the rest of our time playing the game. He was the man with the plan and we were the guys willing to take orders for our share. It felt like we were joining a mission to rob from the game itself, planning to pull a job on the developers. It's like planning to raid the Blizzard building or buying the Ice Key from Rare. In this sort of game, it was strangely meta how this one guy had this one score we could all try and get together. Like real bank robbers.

Eager and excited to be looking for secret gold, we started the mission.

So, The Overdrill Heist appears to go as normal. You walk inside, case the joint, look for cameras and then barge into the Bank's manager. Then, you start the heist. One of you gets a keycard from the manager while everyone else kills the cameras and any guards while taking as many hostages as possible. Once the door to the server room is open, two of you pick up the cans of Thermite and one of you picks up the drill. The Drill is placed on the door between you and the bank vault. From here, you sit and wait, picking off police and SWAT until the door is drilled through. Then you rush through to a room above the vault and drop the thermite onto the floor.

Ordinarily, this would be when the team could breathe easy. We'd gotten to the prize the game had told us was the goal. But Bob was giving directions.

The door that you drill leads into a Lobby with various lifts on either side. It looks like the lobby from The Matrix only it had colour and I was only armed with a shotgun, an automatic rifle and a silenced pistol. I guess I could knock out a few people with my ammo bag but I can't find the button. Plus, the coppers have guns. Running up to them to whack them with a heavy rucksack is only going to result in a few unwanted holes.

Anyway, the first aspect of Operation Overdrill is to not shoot the cameras once you get into this lobby after the drilled door. From here, you then arrange yourself into a sort of cross formation. I had to stand nearest the double doors at one end, facing the desk while another of the team faced me. Then the other two of the four man crew stood facing each other just in front of the desk.

Not even 'Stop 'n' Swap' was this weirdly complex. Sort of fitting...if I was playing Indiana Jones and the Funding for the Fourth Film​

This...somehow, triggered a little light in the desk to start flashing. This then revealed a shutter door at the far end of the second hallway leading down to the vault.

So, one of our party set up a second drill on this shutter then burned through the floor to get to the money in the vault while also sitting around watching the drill on the secret shutter. She would then constantly relay the current time left on the drill's counter.

The drill in these game's is basically a way of creating a time constraint on the group, forcing you to hold your ground in a certain position for a certain length of time. This is a lot harder than it sounds considering the relative realism of your task. You have guns and a finite amount of ammo. The police will drop easy but so can you.

And you'll never run out of police.

Now, normally drills and saws will only make you wait for a few minutes with occasional splutters to a halt which force you to restart them. Operation Overdrill will make you wait around for 33 minutes. That's over half an hour of police raid after police raid, with steadily diminishing ammo. While I could sit in a corner with my shotgun, using it's natural stopping power to pick off guys one by one while sitting in a corner. However, ammo for the shotgun is low so I fall on the rifle. While vastly more accurate and automatic, I'm trying to conserve bullets here so I have to be careful and pick people off one by one in order to make every shot count.

Then there's the silenced pistol. Great for when you want to kill quietly, crap for killing indiscriminately. Because it felt akin to a peashooter, I was forced to use it like a cowboy shooting from the hip, peppering everything with everything.

So, for thirty minutes, we endured wave after wave. The three ammo bags we carried lasted about 15 minutes. After that, we were down to whatever the police dropped as they died, still waiting on this drill to get through the shutter. We had the game on Easy but it was still a struggle. The sheer fact that the game was forcing a marathon on us was daunting enough. Every shot had to count or else you were down to whacking them over the head.

And if waving the Ammo bag wasn't going to work, pistol whipping certainly wouldn't. A Demoknight, you are not.

The plan boiled down to using the corridor between the first Drill door and the lobby after it as a bottleneck, keeping any police away from us for the entire 33 minutes. This point had major advantages as it was actually two blind corners that meant that the police had to move into our line of fire to get us. As long as we had ammo, we always had the advantage. They dropped like flies, meaning lots of dropped ammo to perpetuate the cycle.

"Bang bang! Ooo, look some ammo! Bang bang!"

The plan worked, of course. We managed to sit around for 33 minutes blasting coppers only to find that there's one last hurdle. You see, between you and the gold vault, there's a tile puzzle. This tile puzzle requires you to push certain tiles in a certain pattern to get past it. Thankfully, Bob knew the solution off by heart and could get us in easy.

It's not what your expecting. You poke the correct tiles or you loose and get pelted with neurotoxin, basically. It's a touch basic for a legendary Easter Egg of incredible wealth.​

Boom, done! Into the Vault!

Inside, there's a slightly downgraded texture to everything. It looks a little ugly compared to the rest of the game but, I didn't care. Picking up each gold bar as quickly as possible as well as one more goodie: a christmas gift. What is that? No idea. Apparently there's an achievement for picking it up so I can only imagine it's a Christmas promotion thing.

You know, like Knights: Into Dreams will go Christmassy if you play it in December, only with more guns and people wearing masks.

Interestingly, performing the Overdrill will also net you an Achievement. Which I think is pretty cool, as it's at least a clue to whatever the hell it is. Otherwise, it's just confusing. Makes me wish other games did that. Like maybe Sonic CD and that weird 'Satan screen' easter egg.

Achievement Unlocked: Sega, what were you thinking?

Anyway, true to his word, Bob had got us to the gold. All $70 million of it. What was even better was that I was now climbing levels like I was being ravaged by the Rare Candy cheat. By the end, I had climbed around 30 levels, reaching from about Lvl 18 to 48 within a matter of five minutes. I found that my armour perks were better, my beloved shotgun was now several leagues better than before and I had a few new pieces of equipment.

I gotta say, I was pretty chuffed as we ran from the scene, bolting through the police and offices towards our getaway vehicle. The notifications for each new level, and the new equipment perk that came with each one, lasted the entire time as I ran. It's pretty peculiar in a game that tries to keep a semblance of realism to have a shotgun that was suddenly growing the space for two more cartridges in it's chamber, seemingly from magic.

Now, I really, really like this little Easter Egg for a multitude of reasons.

Firstly, it now has this little story attached, making it a little magical that I got to feel a little like the character's I was playing as completely by accident in my own little way.

Secondly, the reward is awesome. 30 levels in one go is really, really cool. I wish I could have something like this in other games similar to it as this now opens up more of the game to me. Before, my lackluster equipment meant that I couldn't play the harder maps without starting to feel like a burden. Now, I might have a better shot at it.

Thirdly, I don't feel like I've cheated myself all that much. Yes, the gold will spawn every time you play that level, allowing you to farm that level for gold until you've got everything. However, it's such a slog to get through it all that I kinda don't want to. I mean, I'd rather try playing through all the levels and getting to know them better, playing them on harder difficulties and beating the game fairly, with the help of this 30 Lvl boost. I might try it again but the 33 minute stake out and complexity of the Easter Egg puts me off trying to grind for gold over and over. It doesn't sound like fun to me, necessarily.

Lastly, unlike the Rare Candy Cheat from Pokemon, I haven't broken the game in anyway. I was not only meant to discover this bundle of wealth but it's not as if I've maxed out everything. Like I said, it's a boost. I have effectively allowed myself to get a lot of stuff in only one area of the game and XP can be channeled into three areas. What they are, I don't know...The Reputation system in PAYDAY seems strange to me, I usually ignore it. Even so, I haven't cheated myself out of playing the game normally, I've just sped up the process of XP grinding to make me a little better at the still-challenging missions in this game.

The Rare Candy cheat was no substitute for training thanks to EV levels, this feels far more rewarding as a result. My skill and challenge in the game is still the same currently, so...there's nothing to really worry about.

So, there. My little take on an Easter Egg.

If you want to try it yourself and are too lazy to Google it, try the wiki.