Hoxton Hootenanny: Payday 2's Crimefest Updates

Look, you can't name your company Overkill Software then do things meekly. Your games need to shoot thousands of men, steal millions of dollars, and roll out patches in big ostentatious displays. To celebrate co-op heist 'em up series Payday's third birthday, over twelve days Overkill have added to Payday 2 everything from new weapons and snazzy sunglasses to a grand new mission and a playable cheap Keanu Reeves lookalike, all for free. They called it Crimefest.

The twelve days of community challenges, announcements, and patches wrapped up yesterday, so let's see what we've got: a party big filled with new weapons, modifications, masks, and sunglasses; a ten-minute live-action movie of shootybangs; a reworked skill system with a new skill tree; day and night versions of some maps; the announcement of more DLC; a playable version of John Wick, the eponymous hitman star of Keanu Reeves's new movie (marketing!); the playable return of cheeky Brit heister Hoxton; and a big multi-stage heist to free Hoxton from custody. That's quite a lot. You'll need to join the Steam Community group to get all the shinies.

Sadly, the new female heister teased earlier this week wasn't included with the final update. A creepy Scottish lady would've been a nice addition to a crew that's now six dudes.

I haven't got to free Hoxton myself yet as I don't have a regular crew to play with and am still too low-level to make up for the AI's shortcomings on higher difficulties. Boo. From what I've seen, though, it's a big loud semi-linear thing across several missions with big fancy set pieces. Here's a video I yoinked off YouTube showing how it kicks off: