Introduction

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Live fast, die young - leave a good lookin’ corpse, right? To get what you want - you gotta figure out who you’re willing to throw-down against.

• Travis Baker

It’s Eurojank with a budget, it’s like if one of those mobile game ads was actually real, it’s Crime Boss.

You see, I was a big fan of PAYDAY 2 in the last decade or so, the bombastic Hollywood bank robbery simulator, and after hundreds of hours I was looking forward to PAYDAY 3 as well, but while I was impressed with PAYDAY 3’s gameplay formula as soon as it launched it got bogged down by crippling server issues that caused almost its entire playerbase to drop out, followed by efforts to mend things by the developers that were… Let’s just say they left a lot to be desired.

So after a few months of the PAYDAY drought, my friend and fellow heister Booyak linked me some videos about an interesting game that some PAYDAY YouTubers had started promoting as an alternative, Crime Boss: Rockay City, Crime Boss actually came out before PAYDAY 3 but it was initially dismissed as a poor man’s PAYDAY by the few people who bothered to play it, most didn’t pay it any mind, but with PAYDAY’s newest entry turning out to be a dud Crime Boss found an opening and a second chance at life, this is where I come in.

At first I had no interest in the game, since it was an Epic Games exclusive and I have 0 interest in the dogshit platform that is the Epic Games Store, but then in June the game became available on Steam with all of its DLC packs (2 DLC campaigns - Dragon’s Gold Cup and Cagnali’s Order, and 2 weapon packs) bundled in for free as a limited time offer, so I bought Booyak and myself a copy so we could find out exactly what all the fuss was about.

Basic Premise

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We inside. We on the scout. Got the usual, guards, cameras and windows.

• Hielo

Just in case you might argue that PAYDAY comparisons are unfair and the game should be judged entirely on its own merits, the Managing Director of the development studio behind the game has clearly labelled the game as a PAYDAY spiritual successor and stated that the game’s publisher 505 Games, the original publishers of PAYDAY 2, got the ball rolling with Crime Boss because they wanted their own PAYDAY in their back catalogue. Damion Poitier, the voice of Chains in PAYDAY 2 and 3, is also a developer, writer and voice actor for the game as well.

If you don’t know how PAYDAY works, here’s a summary from another article I wrote:

Gameplay is split between “Loud” and “Stealth”, in Loud you have to fend off escalating waves of Cops augmented by occasional Special Units or “Specials”, the staples being the self-explanatory Shield (he has a big riot shield), the Taser who true to his name will zap you locking you in place and making you shoot randomly if you get too close, the Splinter Cell knockoff called the Cloaker who can knock you down instantly with a kick, a tanky shotgunner/machinegunner called the Bulldozer and then the Snipers, oh so many fucking snipers…

In stealth you have to dodge various security systems like cameras, lasers and alarms as well as patrolling guards, who are very easy to kill but for each one you kill (or capture) you have to answer their pager, you have a fixed number of times you can do this and after that any pager that goes off will cause an alarm.

Some heists only allow Loud playstyles, others are Stealth only, many of them accommodate both styles, although once you go Loud you can’t go back to Stealth for the rest of the Heist.

Crime Boss follows this same gameplay loop, but with a bunch of its own tweaks:

• In PAYDAY when it comes to bringing AI teammates you can only choose between bringing a full crew of bots or no bots, Crime Boss lets you choose how many you want to bring

• There are no Cloakers in Crime Boss, just the Bulldozer (known in CB as the Heavy), the Sniper and the Taser (known as the Scout), with additional special unit added by the Cagnali’s Order DLC, the Cagnali Robots, robo-cops that use sci-fi weaponry and have a chance to explode on death

• In PAYDAY all heisters are functionally the same, only differing in their looks and their voice lines, in Crime Boss they each have unique attributes: Different movement speeds, different numbers of times they can be revived before dying, different starting weapons and equipment and different perks, though you do get to make your own custom boss with customisable perks as well

• In PAYDAY health is manually restored through health kits or medic bags, complemented by an armour system, with medic bags restoring the number of revives a heister gets before death, in Crime Boss health regenerates automatically, there’s no armour system to be found and revives cannot be restored mid heist

• In Crime Boss you don’t have to answer pagers, but you still can only kill a limited number of guards before the alarm goes off under a “3 strikes and you’re out” system, unlike PAYDAY however you can get strikes for other things like destroying cameras or being spotted behaving suspiciously, but you don’t get strikes for taking guards hostage, making stealth easier than PAYDAY in some areas and harder in others

• In PAYDAY you can only leave a heist once you have enough loot, in Crime Boss as long as the escape vehicle is on the map you can leave at any time

• In PAYDAY you can’t pick up weapons from dead enemies, you can only use the weapons you brought into the heist, in Crime Boss you can pick them up

• In PAYDAY you have 2 types of loot, small items which you can instantly pick up and carry with no restrictions and large items which you have to put into a bag, you can only carry 1 bag at a time, in Crime Boss all items work the same way, they progressively fill a meter which when full has to be carried as a bag, you can carry up to 2 bags at once (you can use an item called the Mule Booster to temporarily carry 3) and when carrying maximum bags you can only use your sidearm

• In PAYDAY you can temporarily mark special units, giving them a highlight on the map that appears to all players, in Crime Boss the player can mark all enemy units and even civilians and the mark lasts infinitely (though on higher difficulties you can only do this a set number of times and they disappear over time)

• In PAYDAY you start in what’s called “casing mode” with your weapons holstered, guards and civilians won’t be suspicious of you unless they catch you in private areas of the map, to use your weapons you have to “mask up” and after this guards will start to become suspicious and civilians will start to panic on any sighting of you, once you mask up there’s no option to unmask, in Crime Boss you have the option to holster your weapons at any time

• In both PAYDAY and Crime Boss you often have to use drills to unlock certain doors, safes and vaults, in PAYDAY these drills have a random chance to jam, in Crime Boss they don’t but you can play a minigame where you can speed up the drill by holding interact and letting go at the right time, not letting go fast enough causes a jam

• In PAYDAY mission critical items like keys and drills are only held by the 1 heister that picked them up (passed on to someone else if they die or leave the game) in Crime Boss they’re held in a shared inventory and can be used by all heisters

• In Crime Boss weapons, cosmetics, equipment and heisters are all rated and colour coded by a tier system (Common/Grey, Uncommon/Green, Rare/Blue, Epic/Pink and Legendary/Yellow), PAYDAY 2 has something similar, but only for weapon skins, its otherwise missing from the series

AI

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Follow the fucking leader.

• Travis Baker

With the exception of the health system, which is a sidegrade, and the specials, which are an outright downgrade, these differences are all straight improvements on the formula to me, Crime Boss also has far superior AI teammates as well, in PAYDAY the AI does nothing in stealth, hanging back at the start of the level and leaving you to do all the work, and in loud all they can do is shoot enemies, revive teammates and carry bags for you (though in PAYDAY 3 they can also drop deployables between waves).

In Crime Boss the AI will still hang back by default in stealth but you can order them to come with you, if you bring them to the loot they’ll bag it up for you, if you toss a bag on the ground they’ll go and grab it and deliver it, if there’s a lock in the way they’ll pick it,

_{Mozart, my pack mule, handles all the bags for me while I read texts}

and if a nearby guard or a civilian is at risk of causing an alarm they’ll go and subdue them, this means a lot of the more tedious parts of the gameplay can be handled for you by the bots, although they’re a bit less reliable when it comes to subduing guards, sometimes they cock it up and let the guards get a shot off.

Many heists also include a “start heist” button which appears during stealth, holding it will prompt the AI to draw their weapons, move out from their passive starting positions, subdue everyone they find, and start bagging the loot if you’ve already found it.

In combat they’ll also automatically pick up better weapons that they come across if they only have a melee weapon or a weak firearm, they’ll also drop a bag when under pressure so they can use their primary weapon.

They’ll do all of this on their own initiative, but they can also be directly ordered to do a range of things in both stealth and loud: Subduing guards, killing specific targets, tying up hostages, bagging up the loot and carrying and delivering those bags.

There’s also a quick command wheel where you can order either all of your bots or one specific bot to follow you, hold position, or deliver whatever loot they happen to be carrying to the dropoff point.

On top of all that, you (as the player in singleplayer or the host in multiplayer) can actually use this menu to switch between playing as your main character and the bots on the fly, letting you take advantage of all of their different perks and bits of equipment, this comes with all sorts of advantages: If your current character gets knocked down you can switch to someone else and revive them rather than crossing your fingers and hoping the AI will do it for you, if a civilian is trying to run away you can switch to the character closest to them and catch up.

Heist Randomisation

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I’m fully fuckin’ loaded so look out!

• Travis Baker

On top of this setup is a very healthy dollop of randomisation, there’s some low level stuff like the layout of the maps and the placements of guards, which is a trick PAYDAY had up its sleeve as well, Crime Boss adds a little bit more to this layer of randomness, some doors that would normally be locked can start unlocked instead, sometimes ordinary Security Guards can be replaced with Beat Cops or Elite Security, but it also goes a layer deeper, throwing even more curveballs into the mix.

Sometimes heists will have extra modifiers like having the player randomly start in the middle of the heist (in stealth or in loud), starting with all the cameras already switched off, or having rival gangs interfere with the heist somehow.

A few examples of this from my experience, there’s a heist called Money Train where you have to rob a derailed cash train in a subway station, usually the bomb that derails the train causes a massive fire on the platform and the train, forcing you to put the fires out around the train, saw through its doors, put the fire out inside the entrance to the train, saw through 2 more doors to get to the cash, put the fires out in those areas too, then steal the loot and move it to the getaway, but sometimes you can start with no fires at all and the saw already on the door, sometimes the game will also add a train door key to the map that you can grab, allowing you to unlock the doors inside the train with no need to saw, making the start of the job quicker and easier.

Then, the Jewelry Store, usually this job plays out at daytime with a small group of guards and a bunch of civilians to control, I got a night time variant with no civs and a bunch of guards, we managed to break in, get the guards under control and start grabbing the pearls, everything was going smoothly and quietly, but then out of nowhere Khan’s gang showed up, planning to rob the same store, leading to a massive shootout with them and then the cops who showed up to respond.

Mall robbery, in one session I got this job twice in a row, but the first time it was a night variant where only 1 shop had any civilians, a group having a dance party, so I just avoided that one and pilfered the rest, which were all empty, we also started on the rooftop with a path straight to the security room, the second time it was a day variant starting on ground level.

The gameplay dynamics were different each time, on the first run all I had to do was sneak in, turn off the cameras then tell the bots to grab all the loot, in the second run I had to worry about lockpicking into the back of the building, then go from store to store tying up the staff and the customers and moving them out of sight, so we could grab the loot without suspicion, it was the exact same job but a few alterations made it feel different.

Lastly, warehouse robbery, there’s a large warehouse job where the warehouse is usually populated by one of the gangs, they come in large numbers and that can make the job very difficult to pull off in stealth, although killing gangsters doesn’t give you a strike the more of them there are the more likely you are to be caught. But sometimes the warehouse is populated by security guards, cameras and a few civilians instead, making it easy to slip into the security room, turn the cameras off, tie everyone up then rob the place blind.

This is already enough to do the heavy lifting in keeping the heists interesting, but some jobs take it to another layer of randomisation, this warehouse job doesn’t just have these kinds of variations, it also has completely different map variants entirely. I don’t mean they change the layout of a few rooms or something, I mean you can take on the same job and find yourself robbing a totally different building each time. 

There are many different warehouses, with variants large and small, inland or by the docks, above ground or underground, even though the objective is always the same, find and break open some crates and bring the loot inside to the escape, there are a bunch of different locales the job can take place in, some versions are more likely to be patrolled by guards, others more likely to have gangs instead, some have drug packets as their loot, some have electronics, some have precious metals, some have escapes by helicopter, some by boat, others by van.

Sometimes there isn’t even a warehouse at all, just a small boathouse with a guard and a few workers dotted around, no cameras, the loot out in the open for the taking.

There are other heists that have this element of building variety too; One job, Hidden Vault, can take place in either the Vertigo Bank or the Imperial Bank, 

another, the Rockay Deposit Reserve, has 2 variations: A small branch and a large one, the large one often being much harder to rob than the small one due to the extra number of places the key areas like the security room, the vault and the computers needed to unlock it can be and the distance between those areas that you have to cover.

I could go on with example after example but by now you get the point, even after over 100 hours I was still coming across new variants I didn’t even know existed, so although the game only has around 20 or so jobs (better than PAYDAY 3’s 12 but paling in comparison to PAYDAY 2’s 80+) the sheer amount of variation on offer makes it feel like much more, even after playing these jobs again and again and again it didn’t get boring for me because the game still had plenty of twists and turns around the corner. Well, that and the gameplay loop is just really fun.

Game Modes (Multiplayer)

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Moment of truth - the fuck’s it gonna be?

• Travis Baker

From these heists you get cash, which you can spend on 2 things: Your boss and your team.

Your team is your heist crew, you buy a new heister and you can bring them along to your playthroughs of Shuffle and Missions, your boss is a custom character who you can also bring in those modes.

The boss is unique in that you can actually customise their starting weapons, equipment and perks, and you can choose from a wide variety of preset appearances for them called characters.

Not all of these unlocks are available at the start, each time you level up you get the option to pick from 3 possible unlocks, it might be a new weapon, a bit of equipment, a new perk, a new boss skin or a weapon skin and once you have it you can then go and buy it.

The game’s heists are available in 3 flavours:

• Missions, where you pick a single job to do

• Shuffle, where you play 3, 4 or 5 randomly selected jobs in a row, failing one fails the whole shuffle and completing all jobs gives you a nice bonus

• And Urban Legends, each “Legend” is a chain of 3 missions connected together by cutscenes where you have to bring preset heisters rather than being able to choose your own crew, allowing you to try out heisters and equipment you haven’t actually unlocked yet with each Legend you complete you unlock the next one

Baker’s Battle

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There will be no remembrances if you fail to secure the crown.

• Nasara

This improved flavour of the PAYDAY formula (combined with the fact that the game isn’t Always Online like PAYDAY 3) already gave Crime Boss a big appeal to me, it’s a co-op multiplayer experience that feels like PAYDAYs long lost brother, and that brother is a cool guy.

But that formula is only a small piece of the puzzle, the heists used for the Multiplayer are actually taken from a different mode where the real meat of the game lies: Its dedicated singleplayer mode called Baker’s Battle.

Baker’s Battle is a campaign which blends the PAYDAY-style formula with roguelite mechanics and a gang warfare strategy system.

How it works is this: The setting is Rockay City, Florida, USA; The criminal kingpin of the city has just been blown up and your job is to make drug baron Travis Baker the new king, with the help of his business manager Casey, his fixer Nasara (Poitier’s character), his heist planner Gloves, his army commander Captain Touchdown and his army, the Graves.

You do that by taking over all of the city’s districts (called turfs) which are controlled by 4 factions - Hielo’s Chicos, Khan’s Riders, Dollar Dragon’s Sicarios, and the Scudos (either the Cagnali Industries PMC run by Cagnali if you have the Cagnali’s Order DLC, or a Mafia faction run by Don Barbaro if you don’t), there are also some turfs which start out neutral.

To take a turf that’s neutral you just pay a fee and use up 10 of your soldiers and it’s yours, you take turfs that are controlled by the factions by playing a gang warfare mode, you choose how many of your soldiers you want to send into the district (you have to send at least 10) then you fight the enemy gang.

In this mode you play as a random soldier as the 2 rival armies battle it out on a fairly small map, and if your soldier dies you just move on to the next. You have to wipe out enough of the enemy’s army for their Captain (a mini-boss enemy) to show up, if you kill their captain before they wipe out your troops the turf is captured and the enemy gang flees.

You’re also on a timer and if that runs out you fail the turf war, but you have so much time that it’s almost impossible to run out, in hundreds of turf wars I’ve played I only ever ran out of time once, and that was because I was playing super cautiously against the Captain because I had almost run out of troops.

Any soldiers that die during these battles stay dead and the soldiers that survive need to rest until the next day after the battle.

To eliminate a faction from the game you have to take over all of its turfs.

Sounds simple enough but here’s the thing, you need money to do anything in Rockay City. Sending your soldiers into a battle costs money, and you need to have soldiers in the first place, hiring new soldiers costs money.

Oh, and your soldiers start off at Tier 1 of 3, with the Tiers deciding what weapons and equipment they get, if you want to increase their tier that costs money too.

Some of these costs can also be paid with certain types of loot instead however.

How do you make money then? 2 main ways, owning turfs and doing heists, this is where the heisting element comes in.

Heists are worth way more than just owning turfs but they come with more risk, your heisting crew is separate from your soldiers, you start with just 3 of them and Baker himself and you can hire more heisters from there, but they’re very expensive, heisters you bring on a job will also take a cut of its profits, which varies from heister to heister.

Just like your soldiers any heisters in your crew that die on the job stay dead, and if Travis dies your whole run is over, as a risk/reward element having Travis with you will boost the value of your loot by half, a feature called Baker’s Bonus. Wounded heisters that you leave behind will also go missing, with a chance for them to come back later, need rescuing in a mission, or turn up dead.

Surviving Heisters that make it back also need to rest until the next day after doing a job, except Travis who can do 2 jobs per day.

As well as raw cash a share of the heist is also paid out as loot, which can be sold in whatever quantity you choose on a market, where prices fluctuate each day, and sometimes used to pay for certain costs instead of money.

If you’re desperate you can also take on loans, which give you a lump sum of cash in exchange for forcing you to pay a certain amount back per day, be careful with this because taking on a loan you can’t afford, or making certain payments you can’t afford if the game allows you to, will put your funds in the minus numbers, if you don’t resolve that crisis within a few days you go bankrupt and soldiers will start leaving, no one likes to take on a job if they’re not on the payroll, especially if that job is murder.

The day is essentially your turn, you can do as much with that day as you have the resources for: Take turfs, do heists, sell loot, recruit troops, buy, upgrade and kit out heisters and so on, and you can end the day whenever you like, but once you do the other factions get their turns, and so do the cops.

The cops have 2 moves, sending detectives and investigation. The investigation bar fills by a certain amount each day and once it reaches 100% the next day is a game over, Baker has to escape the city or die trying.

The amount the bar fills by is based on your Heat at the end of the day, Heat is increased by playing gang warfare or doing heists, doing heists Loud and causing collateral damage (killing civilians or subdued guards) will cause it to increase the most.

Heat will also cause gangs and cops to throw tougher responses at you, for example in turf war at the lowest Heat level enemy turfs won’t have a Captain and you can take the turf just by killing all of the regular soldiers, at higher Heat levels they send multiple Captains, while during Heists the police response will be much harsher and faster on higher Heat levels if you go loud, at Heat Level 1 you can expect pistol toting beat Cops as the first responders, with SWAT only joining the party if you stick around, at Heat 5 they’ll be tossing Bulldozers and armies of SWAT troopers right from the get go, good fucking luck!

Heat resets at the start of each day.

Detectives make the turf war more difficult by “clearing” turfs, they appear on a turf and the next day it turns neutral, if a rival gang borders that turf they can capture it without a fight as well.

The factions basically have 1 move, attack, and it comes in 3 forms: Business attack, Warehouse attack and Turf attack.

Business and Warehouse attacks are fairly rare, they force you to send your heist crew to defend the business/warehouse in a mission where you hold the enemy faction off until a timer runs out: If your crew gets wiped or you end the day without playing the defence you’ll lose a chunk of your loot.

Turf attacks are far more common, in these you play as the M60 toting Touchdown, who can be backed up by the soldiers of your army if you want to send them, holding off waves of enemies on a timer.

If you succeed in wiping out the enemy in time the turf stays yours, if Touchdown gets knocked down, time runs out, or you don’t play the defence before ending the day the turf is taken by the enemy, if you lose all of your turfs you’re dead.

(As with turf war, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll run out of time in a defence, it never happened to me in any of my runs.)

Factions can also go to war with each other as well as you, but this is also rather rare.

_{Hielo goes to war with Khan, Khan retaliates and expands his empire to the left, I take the opportunity to attack from him the right, then surround both of them from multiple angles, allowing me to then wipe them both out with ease}

There’s also another element of strategy to this, connections. Each turf has a connection to one or more other turfs, represented by white lines on the map, a faction can only go for turfs that are connected to turfs they already own, and that includes you.

It’s a limitation but it can also work to your benefit, if you cut a faction’s turf off from all of its connections that turf instantly becomes yours, allowing you to take multiple turfs in a single attack.

It also allows you to play defence through offence, if you take over the turf an enemy faction is attacking you from their supply lines are cut and the attack is immediately stopped without a fight.

In this run I got attacked by Hielo from Grove, but both Grove and Port Island had only 1 connection to the rest of Hielo’s turf, Low Haven, so I took over Low Haven, cut both territories off and automatically gained them, in one attack I saved my turf, took 3 new turfs for the price of 1 and bisected Hielo’s remaining territory, his remaining scraps were easy pickings from there.

The only exception to this rule is that if a gang is down to their final turf it can’t be taken through cutoffs, you have to fight for it; That final turf is also extra challenging too, always having 3 Captains to beat (with the exception of the Cagnali faction, where you fight a Minigun toting Cagnali as the final Captain instead) with an extra large reward for conquering it.

Here’s how this can play out in a wider campaign: In one of my other runs Khan attacks me from Downtown, I take over Grove which automatically takes Downtown as well since Khan has no more connections to it, and the attack is stopped.

Then I take over the West End from Cagnali so she can’t take Old Bruno, a turf of mine that a detective is clearing; Taking West End cuts off Edgewood, making that mine too and leaving Cagnali with only one turf, Beautiful Ridge.

The next day Cagnali and Khan attempt to recover, Cagnali attacks Riverside from Beautiful Ridge, Khan attacks Antigua from Low Haven, I take Beautiful Ridge and Low Haven and cut them off again, since Cagnali lost her last turf her faction is eliminated from the game leaving Khan as the last man standing. I reclaim Old Bruno and end the day to recover my resting soldiers.

Khan makes one last ditch attempt to stop me by attacking Low Haven from Port Island, I take the neighbouring Rockay Port, then Port Island, and claim victory as King of Rockay City.

The connections system and defence through offence make turf war a really fun strategy game, and the fact that you actually have to play these battles out in FPS form makes it much more fun for me than something like say, Civilisation, where you just have to roll the dice and watch a dinky little animation to see how a battle goes with no direct influence over the results. Actually playing out these conflicts makes it feel like you’re fighting a proper war where your actions make the difference between failure and success.

The police investigation also ensures that you have to play boldly and can’t just rely on slowly plodding your way along through the turf battles without risking your heist crew or Baker.

Like with the heists this formula is further spiced up by randomisation: Sometimes you’ll get high tier heisters who randomly show up and join your crew for free, sometimes your heisters will try and pull jobs on their own and you’ll have to choose whether to save them (which involves playing a mission as them, trying to get their loot out to an escape car) or leave them to die.

And sometimes the game will just toss in random financial gains and losses at you, maybe your gang steals the profits of a rival gang’s heist, maybe they trash a local business and you have to pay damages, maybe you need to buy more rubber bands for all of those cash piles you’ve been collecting… Yes, you can seriously get that one sometimes.

Gang warfare is subject to the RNG too, ranging from which maps you play in the gang war battles to if and when the other gangs attack each other (and you) and when they upgrade their armies (except for Cagnali, who always starts at Tier 3).

You can also sometimes get special missions your heist crew can do, like destroying cars or gang assassinations, that will instantly conquer an enemy turf or turn it neutral without the need for a turf war, allowing you to take over turfs you don’t have a direct connection to.

On the final enemy turf these will give you the option to lower the enemy gang’s army tier and troop numbers instead.

The game also tosses a few “big heists” into each run (if you last long enough, that is), these are heists with dedicated storylines surrounding them with shorter sub-missions you have to do as prep work before pulling off the job, usually with millions of dollars to be earned and a choice at the end that gives you different rewards, with different outcomes also emerging based on whether you completed the job in stealth or loud.

Some of the high tier heisters also have dedicated storylines that can be randomly thrown into the mix as well, with that heister becoming available at the start of every subsequent run if you complete them.

There are even curveball events that can cause a faction to disappear from the game entirely without you having to beat them through the turf war: Hielo has a random chance to pack up and leave Rockay, turning his territories neutral, certain big heist choices can prompt Dollar Dragon to do the same thing or even join Baker as his right hand man, handing all of his turfs to you without a fight and becoming part of the heist crew, and if you happen to get a certain Big Heist that involves Khan’s prized coke filled Yacht, the Miss Olga, you can turn the coke over to the Police, causing Khan and his faction to be instantly eliminated.

Cagnali’s faction can be wiped out without any need for a turf war by completing the “Cagnali’s Order” storyline, which has a random chance to pop up allowing you to complete a chain of 3 missions that leads to you storming Cagnali’s HQ and killing or exiling her, ending with her robots either being destroyed or converted to serve Baker’s crew.

And of course, the heist randomisation itself can lead to some intense risk/reward scenarios given the roguelite nature of Baker’s Battle, 2 little stories come to mind.

One time I took on a smaller variant of the warehouse job which usually involves pilfering the place while dealing with a few guards and cameras, this time however the place had already been raided by Khan, the cameras were already down, the guards corpses were spread across the floor, and a few of Khan’s goons were left messing about or cleaning up the bodies, I easily killed them all and looted the goods from their van and the loosely scattered piles of boxes they were carrying out, it was even easier than I expected it to be.

That was reward, so what about risk? Well, one especially hair-raising example came from a bank heist, the game has several bank heists but one is just called “Bank Robbery”, it’s the RDR branch bank. By the time this particular attempt at it came around I had played the job so many times that I knew it like the back of my hand and could easily stealth it, so I decided to just send Baker in on his own to steal all the loot and get out with his nice 50% bonus.

But then the mission started in Loud with Baker already on the rooftop of the building, loot bags spread all across the level, my wanted level to the max. I was besieged by SWAT officers, shield units and robots on all sides, leading to an absolutely terrifying wait for the helicopter, peeking around cover to take pot shots at the swarms of enemies gunning for me, I just barely managed to escape alive with only some of the loot intact.

So, in summary: Your job is to go to war, fundraise that war, and get it all done before the cops have a chance to incriminate you.

It’s quite difficult and you’re not actually expected to succeed at first, that’s where the roguelite element comes in, the levelling and unlock system from Multiplayer crosses over to Baker’s Battle, picking an unlock like a heister or weapon doesn’t just make them available for purchase in Multiplayer, it also makes that unlock appear in your future Baker’s Battle runs as well, so the more you play the more resources are available to you on subsequent runs and the more strategies you can devise.

There’s also a levelling system exclusive to singleplayer called the “Boss Level”, with each level you get to pick certain permanent upgrades for Baker’s Battle, upgrades like starting with more turfs, more money, more heisters on your team, lowering prices, lowering the speed of the investigation, giving Baker extra perks and so on, making the numbers on that Random Number Generator a bit kinder towards you on your next go around.

You can also spend cash on certain permanent “Assets” (decorations) for Baker’s office during a run, sacrificing cash that would go towards your chance at winning in the current run for Boss XP to boost your chances in the next.

Normally I absolutely despise repetition, I’m a vicious save-scummer, spamming the save key every few seconds because I don’t want death to mean going back to where I was before, but somehow roguelite is something I’ve gotten a taste for, first with the DLC trilogy of Far Cry 6 and now with Crime Boss.

When constant repetition is expected and the game is designed with that in mind, with permanent unlock systems to ensure you’re still going somewhere even if you keep finding yourself back at square one, it can actually be very fun, Crime Boss I think does this far better than Far Cry though thanks to its level of randomisation, that plus its multi-genre blend is something that feels really unique and lets Crime Boss stand on its own two feet, generating an endless number of stories to tell. The game might have started as “we’re gonna make our own PAYDAY with blackjack and hookers” but it turned into something that feels very different in all the right ways.

It’s the kind of experimentation you usually only see in Eurojank games that make up for a low budget and lacking quality control with mechanical depth, but Crime Boss actually does feel very polished in most areas and is clearly a game with a bunch of money behind it, resulting in a surprisingly high production value. It’s not indie, it’s not AAA, it’s more like AA.

Early Game Flaws

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Pardon me, Boss… But something… I’m not certain, doesn’t feel right.

• Nasara

Of course, this formula isn’t flawless, the early game feels unfairly punishing and not in the deliberate way the roguelite system encourages where you have to earn the advantage for extra runs: The fact that heisters can only be used once per day is crippling, it would be fine if you could solve that problem by just hiring more heisters but that’s not the case due to extortionate prices, a single extra heister (even a shitty one with bad stats) usually costs more than the maximum payout of a heist, and bringing a heister on a stealth job, even if they do literally nothing, also still counts as them being used and needing to rest.

This meant that I couldn’t just bring my full crew for a stealth job as a precaution in case the heist went Loud, because doing so would mean they would all be out of use in exchange for nothing, making me feel like I was being punished for being good at stealth.

This forced me to only bring Baker for an initial stealth job and the rest of the crew for a loud one, allowing me to do 2 heists per day instead of 1. The problem with that is if you’re on your own there’s no one to revive you, which means getting knocked down is instant death.

I have to be honest, this brutal limitation did cause me to play dirty. Normally your failures are permanent: You cause an alarm, that’s it you have to go loud, Baker dies, that’s it your run is over, your heisters die, that’s it they’re dead, but there’s a loophole, if you quit the game mid heist and come back in you’ll be back at the start of the heist, giving you a do-over, it’s not quite a cheat and the game does nothing to stop you doing it but it’s obviously against the spirit of the game’s design.

I’ll admit I did do this a quite few times in the early game because I felt it was too punishing to have to repeatedly restart my entire run just because I couldn’t get up the fundraising ladder without taking an intense amount of risk, repeatedly failing runs early like this would’ve slowed the earning of Boss XP to a crawl, making actual progress and a chance at completing Baker’s Battle much more time consuming.

I felt guilty doing it but I would’ve gotten far too frustrated and maybe just given up on the game had I not done it, I was happy to accept failure, mistakes and death as part of the game, but not to the point where the unfair heister mechanics made progress slower than a snail racing a sloth.

I only learned far later on that there’s actually a hidden restart option built into the game that isn’t an exploit called “surrender”, surrendering ends the heist with a fail, but any of your surviving crew are alive and unscathed even in loud, it does count as them doing a heist so they’ll be resting until the next day, but you do get the option to try the heist again on the map screen, meaning if you have leftover heisters you can try again straight away, or you can wait until the next day then go again with the same crew as before.

The reason I didn’t know about this is because the game doesn’t tell you about it anywhere and it doesn’t appear in any of the menus, the option to surrender only shows up if you hold alt and f4, in other words you don’t get the restart prompt until you try to crash the game, surrendering is actually in some ways even more generous than restarting by crashing the game, because if you restart through a crash the game will generate a new variant of the heist when you go back in while surrendering allows you to replay the same variant, this means that if you screw up on an otherwise lucky heist variant you can preserve that luck on the next go if you surrender.

When I discovered this I felt a lot less guilty about my past restarts and felt frustrated that this is an option the game completely hides from the player, I appreciate that the developers did this because they want players to take whatever losses the game throws at them and try again rather than give themselves a do-over but I think if the option is in the game and it’s not considered an exploit it should be on the menu and players should know about it, if I had I don’t think I would have ever quit to get a restart.

On top of that though bugs and annoying quirks are few and far between for the game when they do happen the roguelite nature of the game, where failure is much more punishing than an average game, can make them incredibly frustrating, whether that’s the AI freezing, wandering off, getting stuck or leaving themselves vulnerable by repeatedly trying to revive a teammate and backing out again, the game stuttering or crashing or unfair mission objectives, usually when you lose it’s because of your mistakes, when it’s the game’s mistake and you have few or even no avenues of recovery it can get very annoying.

The Grind Part 1 (Singleplayer)

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Do it again, Do it again, Do it again, Do it again, I… Wanna do it again, I wanna do it again, I wanna do it again, ya terrified (I wanna do it again), ain’t gonna go blind ain’t gonna go blind (I wanna do it again), here we go!

• Connected, Stereo MC’s (Crime Boss soundtrack)

Despite this Crime Boss became utterly addictive after getting over the early game hurdles, since the Multiplayer doesn’t have the roguelite system of Baker’s Battle all of its unlocks are permanent, giving you a constant sense of progression to work towards, this left me playing a lot of Multiplayer heists, buying up the elite crew members and boss characters and working my way up the money grind ladder.

And after my 5th campaign win, where I unlocked the perk to start with extra turfs, I got completely addicted to Baker’s Battle too.

Having extra starting turfs allowed me to go on a rapid Blitzkrieg rapidly expanding Baker’s empire, the quicker you expand the sooner you get the option to upgrade your army tier and the quicker you destroy the factions the quicker you get the rewards for conquering their final turf, this strategy also meant that I almost never had to do defence missions, I was able to repeatedly opt for defence through offence instead.

Having the upgrades that gave me a better Heist crew at the start of my runs also massively changed the gameplay dynamic, Heists were now much more manageable and I was able to save most of the profits for myself or spend them on the war rather than having to dump them on trying to build a competent crew, this better crew bonus also meant that I almost always started with a Heister called Mozart who comes with a silenced AK, this turned most of the stealth missions that involved gangs (who you don’t get strikes for killing) into a breeze, another common crew member was Theresa, whose automated Sentry Gun made mincemeat of hostiles in loud, giving me a lot more confidence on those jobs too.

With several upgrades that slowed the investigation under my belt, reducing the police’s speed by 20%, the investigation became irrelevant as well, rarely even reaching half way before I claimed victory even though I was spending every day rampaging across town in the turf war, usually ending each day with max heat.

Combine that with the upgrades that gave me extra starting cash and all of the campaign’s hurdles became easy to climb over, the amount of costs I had to pay were massively reduced and for the ones that still existed like planning the big heists, recruiting the troops and upgrading the army I could more than cover the costs, or in the rare instances where I couldn’t I could just take out a loan to keep the momentum going knowing that I would have no trouble paying it back thanks to the rewards from big heists and storming final turfs.

Travis went from a beaten down underdog to an apocalyptic harbinger of doom, consolidating his power week after week in a rapid bloodbath before anyone even knew what was happening.

That’s not to say it was all a walk in the park, there were many turf wars I won by the skin of my teeth and some nearly botched heists where some of the crew didn’t make it home, being left for dead or left dead, in 2 runs I even failed a turf war entirely; I also screwed up a few of the heister storylines on some runs, pushing back my completion of their stories until the next run or in the case of Ranger, never completing it at all, poor Ranger kept getting himself killed on his final story mission, never to see his happy ending, oh well.

But even with the odd slip up or setback, the experience was extremely fun. After finishing a campaign I would immediately start the next one, telling myself “I’ll just play the first day” or “I’ll just play up to day 2” and then stop and call it a night, but that idea that would rapidly get tossed out of the window because once I got the ball rolling it usually couldn’t be stopped.

On Day 1 I would be expanding as tactically as possible, taking neutral turfs that would block the expansion of other factions or give me angles of attack where I could take enemy turfs through cutoffs, I would already have the war strategies on my mind. Taking those initial turfs would always give me the quest to upgrade the army, so I would usually take on my first mission, stealing Coke to pay for the upgrade, then get the army up to tier 2. Having sent a heister or two to execute gangsters and retrieve the goods, and kitted out my troops for war, the conflict would already have started, so I would end the day and then on Day 2 start executing those war strategies, once I started that conflict I wanted to see it through.

Day 2 is also where the game would introduce the first Big Heist of the run and give me the first prep jobs for it, dangling that prospect of millions in cash and/or a campaign altering choice over my head, and before I knew it I was several days into the campaign, robbing bank vaults, gold depositories and yachts and channelling the funds into the shooting and strategy of turf war. It was hard to break the cycle and either hold myself back from starting a new run or genuinely stop at the first day or two.

It got to the point where when I had time away from the game to work, chat with friends, or just eat, I would keep finding myself thinking that the next thing I wanted to do was play Crime Boss.

I eventually found an off ramp for this addictive cycle of runs when I got the final campaign award on my 22nd run, the first 14 victories you get in the main Baker’s Battle campaign give you unlockable multiplayer characters, and so once I got that 14th skin I decided that was as good a point as any to cool off before the game sapped away all of my free time and got too repetitive, even despite that I still didn’t see all the content in these 22 runs, there was one Big Heist (the Armoured Truck heist chain) that I didn’t get to play, and one high tier heister, (Wiz) whose storyline didn’t pop up for me, so despite repeating Baker’s campaign again and again and again the game still had more surprises in store for when I wanted to pick it back up.

This run of consecutive victories was also very gratifying because I pulled it off without the use of the quit exploit, though I did use the surrender option 3 times to avoid being killed off by stupid mistakes where I bungled stealth missions and my crew didn’t have a shot at surviving. It was a combination of good fortune, skill and the headstarts provided by the Boss upgrades that made these wins happen, and it validated my belief about the problems caused by the high cost of heisters, when I didn’t have to pay those costs because I already had a good crew from the get go heisting became the risky but effective money generator it was supposed to be.

The other upgrades though did tip the balance from the game becoming manageable and fair to too easy, having more starting cash and troops meant that I could totally ignore heisting except for the Big Heists and their associated setups, funding the war effort through turf war victories and loans when they weren’t bringing in revenue fast enough, essentially allowing me to ignore half of the gameplay. By my 15th win in a row I did feel the game was too easy and started to miss the thrill of risk and getting my ass kicked, I stayed on normal difficulty to make getting all those reward characters simple but I decided that for subsequent runs I’d be bumping the difficulty up a notch so Travis and Co. could go back to being underdogs, making those subsequent wins ever sweeter.

The Grind Part 2 (Multiplayer)

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Cage is open, maje.

• Clutch

My break from Baker’s Battle wasn’t the end of my time with Crime Boss though, as I still needed to earn the roughly 30 million dollars needed to buy up all the multiplayer characters I had earned, queue many hours of heisting.

And I do mean very many hours because multiplayer essentially inverts the in-game economy compared to Baker’s Battle, as in the heist payouts are way lower and costs are way higher.

A heist like Gold Cup, fully stealthed with all loot on normal difficulty, goes from being worth 2-4 million in Baker’s Battle to around 300-400k in Multiplayer.

That’s partly because without the rougelite system there’s no special treatment for Baker, meaning no run ending deaths but no Baker’s Bonus either, and partly because loot value is just lowered overall, making for a very slow money grind, all the bullion from that gold depository is about enough to buy you a dinky mid-tier Pistol.

_{I guess Rockay City is going through some insane levels of inflation right now, all those bank robberies we did have devalued the money.}

While higher difficulties give you a bonus to the payout, 20% on Hard and 50% on the highest difficulty, Extreme, the payout still only goes up to around 500k.

The latest major update, Update 11, did add a daily bonus to the Multiplayer (around $500k and 2000 XP for the first heist of the day you beat) to help speed up progression, but it’s only a very meagre boost.

To get to the top of this loony money pyramid I alternated between playing repeated rounds of Hidden Vault, an easy heist I could quickly get through with my brain on autopilot, and long rounds of Shuffle, the Hidden Vault runs were worth about 300k each time while Shuffle could be worth anything between 200 to 800k depending on what heists the randomiser tossed into the mix, while playing Shuffle took far longer since it’s 5 heists not just 1 I introduced it into the mix to keep some level of variety, doing Hidden Vault over and over again would’ve eventually destroyed my sanity, or at least my patience.

But by around Level 90, on one late evening, I found myself with one last campaign character to get, Mighty Mother, and got fed up with the slow progress of my grinding technique, so I decided to try something else: Gold Cup on Extreme, I had never played on any difficulty other than Normal before but decided to give it a go just to see how much more tough it would be.

It turned out to not be very tough at all, while the guards had a much wider detection range and faster detection speed I had by this point learnt Gold Cup like the back of my hand, so I got myself 2 silenced guns, a brick to lure guards if I needed to, and ran circles around the the map, Gold Cup became my autopilot heist and I got to take home that 500k a pop rather than 300k.

Even though it was extremely repetitive humiliating the guards like this and practically speedrunning the job was quite fun, it also helped that the fastest way to play Gold Cup is stealth while the fastest way to play Hidden Vault is loud, loud requires a lot more concentration since you’re, y’know, constantly under siege from cops who are trying to shoot you.

In stealth once you tie everyone up it’s just a matter of getting the loot, so I could play the first half of the heist (tying up all the guards and civs) on autopilot, then the second half of the heist (sticking the saws on all the gates, bagging the loot and tossing it to the bots to bring to the escape) not even really paying attention to the game, I could just stick a saw on a door then tab out of the game or go onto my phone, occasionally tabbing back in to speed up the saw, then once the gate was open bagging up all the loot, tossing it, then putting on the next saw, rinse and repeat.

Gold Cup is also a heist that works quite differently from most others in terms of variation, its main variation comes from the fact that you can actually choose from 3 starting points, Main Gate, Subterfuge (which starts you in the basement) and Aerial Infiltration (which starts you on the roof), with Main Gate being a loud-only approach and the other 2 allowing for stealth, I always played Aerial Infiltration because it’s the only 1 of the 3 starts that allows you to get a keycard for the control room right at the start, and with the security room and the office where you can find the whiteboard for it both being on the top 2 floors starting from the roof rather than the basement also just makes the whole thing faster.

Not only does the Main Gate take way longer because you have to repeatedly C4 your way into the building, it also has an extended escape sequence that forces you to head out of the depot and to a boat a long way away, as long as you stay in stealth you don’t have to do any of this, making things go by way quicker.

Beyond that the heist has very little variation at all, a few guard placements can be switched around, it varies on which cages hold the gold and whether you have 1 saw to use or 2 (in Baker’s Battle you can buy the extra saw while setting up the heist the buttons you need to press on the building’s control room to disable the security change each time (you can always check what they are on a whiteboard on the floor below it), the colours of the wires you need to cut to turn off the lasers on the cages do too (the wire colour appears above the cage), since Multiplayer has no heist setup the game just rolls the dice), other than that there are no surprises, the objectives always work the same way and there are no curveballs.

Running this heist time and time again massively sped up the progress, although it was still sluggish, instead of a whole day of on and off play to unlock a character it only took a few hours, after that I bought up all the perks and started levelling up their tiers, starting with Ghost, which decreases enemy detection speed, and Swift, which increases player speed, which made the subsequent Gold Cup runs even easier, then I got Health, because it was one of the only ones I could afford.

Finding that it was just shy of 7AM, I decided to stop and actually get some sleep, knowing I’d found the winning formula for progression. By the next evening I had almost all of the perks to tier 2, the afternoon after that it was all of them.

It was so easy that I could multitask while doing it, I was chatting with friends, listening to YouTube videos, listening to music, or writing this article, in fact I’m actually doing it right now while I write this!

It got to the point where “a Gold Cup” became a genuine unit of measurement in my mind, if something costs a million dollars that’s 2 Gold Cups, if it’s less than 500k it costs 1 Gold Cup, if we start looking at the highest tier unlocks, 3 to 4 million a pop, well, that’s a lot of Gold Cups…

Now you might think this level of repetition is batshit crazy, and you’d be right, but it’s something I’m no stranger to. Back in the days of PAYDAY 2 my grindy autopilot heists of choice were Hoxton Breakout and Hotline Miami, with an occasional sprinkling in of Undercover and max difficulty stealth heists of Jewelry Store for the early levels, just look at how many times I played those…

Why did I put up with it? Well for the same reason in both games, the gameplay loop was still fun, although I did alternate between enjoying that loop and losing my mind at having to do the exact same routine again for the 10th time just to inch that bit of progress a little forward. So I was still having fun, but I was having fun in spite of the challenge that was in front of me, not because of it.

Even after reaching Tier 2 on all perks and reaching Level 101, about ¾ of the way to max level, I still had an absurdly tall mountain to climb, a dizzying array of weapons left to buy and unlock each costing a fortune, a bunch of the heisters and boss characters still on the menu, and all those weapon skins…

To look at PAYDAY 2 for comparison, the Deagle in that game costs $822,000, not far off from the 1.19 million it costs in Crime Boss, but in PAYDAY 2 Hoxton Breakout pays out 16.25 million dollars on Death Wish, the second highest difficulty, enough to buy about 19 of those Pistols, Hotline Miami with all bags on the same difficulty is worth 30.237 million, enough to buy 36 of them.

Crime Boss doesn’t have any heists that even scratch the surface of those kinds of earnings unless you start messing with cheats or exploits, the Crime Boss wiki doesn’t have pages for the heists yet so I don’t have the hard data on what pays what, but when I asked the community in the Crime Boss Discord what the highest paying heist was I was told it was Gold Cup, and I don’t know of any job that pays better. So there’s your comparison, the best paying heist in PAYDAY can get you over 30 of those Desert Eagles in one go, the best paying heist in Crime Boss can’t even get you one.

Now in fairness, PAYDAY doesn’t need to have high costs for its weapons because they also have a huge array of attachments you can customise them with, which Crime Boss doesn’t, (you can’t buy attachments, only weapon variants that happen to have them in some cases) and in PAYDAY you also have to buy weapon slots for your inventory, in Crime Boss you don’t, PAYDAY also just has more weapons overall, so in PAYDAY the costs can be lower because there’s more to buy.

But do you see how something like this gets extremely draining? I put up with it because I really love this game, but would the average player? Almost certainly not, the average player would probably drop out before even making it half way up this financial pyramid, not because it’s hard to climb but because it’s just tedious.

I appreciate that the thinking here was probably that because all your Multiplayer purchases are permanent unlocks (as opposed to Baker’s Battle purchases which, except for Assets, only last until the run is over) the amount of work you have to put in to get them should be higher, more to gain and less to lose, the logic makes sense on paper but the level they take it to here is ridiculous, it’s way too far.

That same Deagle, by the way, costs about $19,000 in Baker’s Battle, so for Multiplayer they inflated the price by around 100x!

Believe it or not this absurd grindfest was actually easier than it could’ve been, having all the DLC packs meant that I had 2 weapon packs, the Heavy Hitters Pack and the Tactical Weapon Pack, which add several mid and high tier weapons to the game (2 pistols, 2 rifles, 3 shotguns, an SMG, an LMG and a melee weapon, with some of these having multiple variants), in Baker’s Battle you still need to buy them but in Multiplayer you get them for free, so the only things I needed to do to make my player character viable for more or less any scenario were buying some high tier heisters for playing with bots, a silenced SMG and silenced Pistol for stealth.

This allowed me to focus on the rest of the heisters, the boss characters and perks from there (I didn’t give a fuck about the weapon skins), without those DLCs I would have had to go on even more of a money grind just to have good weapons.

Focusing on heisters also actually did allow me to circumvent some of those weapon costs too, for example, why buy a Sniper Rifle for 3 million dollars when I can hire Peak, a heister who starts with that same Sniper Rifle, for 1 million?

This is another example of where the in-game economy just doesn’t make any sense. Now, sure, I technically can’t give that Sniper Rifle to my Boss, in theory the consequence for getting the Sniper from Peak is I have to put up with Peak’s other stats and gear whether I like them or not, I can’t mix and match like I can with my custom Boss.

But there’s a workaround, remember I said you can pick up weapons off the floor? Well, I can start a match with Peak in my crew, kill an enemy, pick up their gun and then the Sniper Rifle will be on the floor, switch to the Boss, grab the Sniper, now they have it, it does mean that poor Peak has to survive with whatever weapons he can scrounge from the floor, but still, this is a way of getting access to some of the high tier weapons on the cheap.

So that’s what I did, I focused on unlocking all of the heisters, although I did start playing Shuffle and some of the other missions again, this time on Hard, rather than just endlessly looping Gold Cup, because I do like to be at least a little sane from time to time.

The Grind Part 3 (All Together Now)

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Time to say ‘adios’ to the dinero.

• Touchdown

And on top of that, I decided to go back to Baker’s Battle, this time on Hard difficulty, this was what salvaged my enthusiasm for the gameplay after being drained by multiplayer’s repetition, after taking a break from Baker’s Battle for a while it felt new again, on my second Hard mode run I got to play through Wiz’s campaign, meaning I’ve now experienced all the character storylines.

Playing on Hard meant the stakes were higher, I was still earning wins but I had to really fight for it. Touchdown got his ass handed to him several times, some turf attacks were lost, many turf attacks and defences were narrowly clinched with me as the last man standing, and on my third Hard mode run I botched a heist so bad my entire elite crew was killed; Ranger got himself shot upstairs while the rest of us were doing a search and rescue mission in a warehouse, when we went back up to help him the cops threw a grenade into the room and the rest was history.

_{Shockingly I actually managed to salvage that run by taking out a massive loan to quickly upgrade my army, paying it off through blitzkrieg warfare and then, when it came down to the last faction, Hielo, doing the jobs from the Armoured Transport big heist, having used some of the leftover funds to hire a new crew.}

So in terms of the major story content all that’s left is poor Ranger, who’s still waiting for his victory, it might take a while longer now that he’s fucking dead.

More Boss Upgrades gave me, among other things, several levels of the “Super Strapped” perk, which improves Baker’s starting primary weapon, he went from starting with his fists to having strong firearms like SMGs and LMGs, allowing me to confidently send him into early game missions on his own, knowing that even if things went south he’d come out alive.

With the combination of these extra Baker’s Battle runs, more runs of Gold Cup, Shuffle and random other missions for multiplayer, I climbed the ranks of the levelling system and hit more milestones, I got my first Tier 3 perks then I hired all of the remaining heisters, and instead of taking any of these as a point to put the game down I just kept going:

More boss characters, more weapons, more equipment, more and more hours going towards heisting and Baker’s contest.

I only finally stopped when a month after Update 11, the Daily Reward bonus broke and stopped appearing, slowing progression speed back to how it was before the update, this finally broke my streak of Crime Boss being the one game I was playing, and I pivoted to playing through several other games (Batman Arkham Origins and the first 3 Assassin’s Creed games, if you’re curious).

A month later the devs dropped Update 11.3 which restored the rewards, by the next week I’d unlocked and bought up everything except the ludicrously expensive legendary tier weapons, each of which cost 3 million a pop, and the weapon skins, which I still didn’t give a fuck about.

The week after that I’d reached max level with 2 weapons to go, that weekend I finally got the last 2, meaning I’ve now, after 294 hours of playtime, 3 months of owning the game, I’ve pretty much finished the game. There’s still the weapon skins, which I still don’t give a fuck about, although I do have to admit I’ve bought some for the sake of spending my loose change, and I still have to reach the maximum Boss Level in campaign, but if there’s a point I could consider completion for this game, this would probably be it.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop playing entirely, but it does mean the game can now take a back seat, and I can move on to other games for the most part.

Conclusion

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I love when a plan comes together the right fucking way. Not gonna lie, that gives me great joy.

• Gloves

So, what are my overall thoughts on Crime Boss? Overall it’s an excellent shooter and heisting game, it does PAYDAY better than the PAYDAY games, the multi-genre Baker’s Battle mode is very creative.

It has its flaws, the game’s performance problems seriously drag the gameplay down when they crop up, the moments where the AI have lapses in judgement range from mild setbacks to crippling kicks in the balls, and then of course there’s the in-game economy.

This is the number 1 thing that brings the game down as it is right now, primarily in the multiplayer, the way it’s designed can make progression either extremely tedious or extremely frustrating.

For singleplayer it’s the heister costs, which make it unnecessarily difficult to heist in the early game, for the multiplayer it’s the “almost everything” costs from start to finish.

The fact that the weapons and equipment cost more than the heisters that carry them just discouraged me from using the custom boss for much of the runtime and the low payouts made everything feel like a drag when it came to the progression system; This wasn’t a deal breaker for me (until the final stretch of my journey to max level, at least) because the overall gameplay loop is just really fun, but the incredibly slow money grind meant that it took far longer to unlock new weapons, heisters and equipment, something that’s needed to keep the gameplay fresh, than it should’ve done.

I can imagine this would be a big turn off to people less hooked on the gameplay loop than me and I’m confident I’m not in the minority on this as having spent some time in the Crime Boss community, especially the game’s Discord server, I only saw one person actually defend the progression system as proportionate or just right, while a whole chorus of people criticised it as too slow and not enjoyable.

For the progression to be fun the heist payouts should really be boosted to something much closer to what they are in the campaign, either that or prices for many of these unlockables should be drastically lowered. Would that mean that the money sink runs dry much quicker? Yes, but if you’re relying on absurdly high money ceilings to pad out the runtime, you’re doing it wrong.

That being said, the game is at its core just really fun, it really has staying power, it got 247 hours out of me before I stopped playing it exclusively and that was only because the Daily Bonus broke, since the Bonus was fixed its gotten another 46 hours from me; It’s already become my 6th most played game on Steam¹, outpacing POSTAL 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout New Vegas, Streets of Rage 4, Deus Ex and other iconic games I’ve loved and played for years, those 294 hours are about a third of my total playtime with PAYDAY 2, I’ve owned Crime Boss for 3 months, I’ve owned PAYDAY 2 for 9 years.

That more than anything else should sum up how much I love this game, and it’s a count that easily could’ve been far higher, I’ve spent a lot of my evenings (and sometimes mornings) going out to gigs this year, meaning I have a lot less free time on my hands than the last few years on average, if it wasn’t for my time being sapped away by live music it probably would’ve been by this game instead.

On top of this, the game has some really bizarre so-bad-it’s good voice acting by a celebrity cast, Baker is played by Michael Madsen, Touchdown is played by Michael Rooker, Casey is played by Kim Basinger, Gloves is played by Danny Glover, the head of the Police force is Chuck Norris, Hielo is played by Vanilla Ice, Dollar Dragon is played by Danny Trejo, and much of their voice acting is comedy gold, sometimes because its deliberately corny (the store page does advertise the “cheesiest dialogues since VHS”) but sometimes its because they’ve monumentally fucked up the delivery of the dialogue with a bizarre out of place tone, Norris in particular fumbles literally every line of dialogue he has, phoning it in so hard the lines will be busy for months; Given that the developers (In-Game Studios) are primarily Czech it’s likely that they simply didn’t know tone well enough to catch these out, or maybe they saw the “so-bad-its-good” elements emerging in the moment and decided to roll with it because it was funny, either way the result is some absolutely hilarious and iconic moments.

“Sky! Fucking sky, motherfucker!”

“Banks. I fucking love banks!”

“Well, new adventures await buddy!”

“You gonna share that? Ya chillin’ villain?”

“Alright… We’ll take back the fort. Let’s ride!”

“That’s happened to me before man, wow. I got over that because it’s a nightmare.”

“GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD CASH! MILLIONS!”

This mix of genuinely expertly done gameplay and ridiculous meme worthy characterisation makes Crime Boss a truly unique gem, but ultimately the key ingredient is developer support, In-Game have been very attentive to community feedback and have kept a frequent pace of updates rolling, making minor tweaks where that’s all the game needs and major overhauls where necessary, for example the warehouse defences used to force you to bring Baker for seemingly no reason other than to make them more difficult, the levelling system connecting Single and Multiplayer originally didn’t exist, with Multiplayer character unlocks being tied to either full completion of their stories in Baker’s Battle or pitch perfect performance in the Multiplayer’s “Urban Legends” mode, the game also previously had far less map variety for turf wars and heists.

The result of 11 major updates across the year since the game first dropped on Epic is excellent, on its initial launch Crime Boss was written off and mostly trashed, now it has a broad positive reception, how much of that is the core game always being good and people giving it more of a fair shake and how much of it is the work put into patching it I can’t say, I only played the Steam release by which point the game was already on Update 9, but either way I can say that Crime Boss as it is now really shines, and with further content updates on the horizon I’m confident the game will only get better.

Special Thanks

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• Booyak - For putting up with and encouraging my Crime Boss running commentary, our DMs were a strong reference point for writing this article!
• Travis Baker - You are the king, and your Baker’s Bonus got me to the coronation
• Mozart - For carrying me through so many of those early game stealth missions in Baker’s Battle, your silenced AK was a treat

Changelog

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• Edit 1 -11/12/24 - Minor typo fixes

Footnotes

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