Due to the unfair nature of the game, there are a lot of them that rely on RNG. Some heavily favor one approach over another, making them agonizing if you're using the "wrong" build. Others are easy with an experienced crew but a nightmare with a poorly-coordinated, inexperienced group. A few are just sadistic. Here is a run-down:
General
- Escape levels are not well liked, and because of this, they didn't survive the first two years of the games' life. For many, they interrupted the flow of the heist, making the session needlessly longer, and oftentimes made little sense anyway (Twitch being replaced by ...Twitch?). Heists after 2014 don't feature them, and even multi-day heists became considerably rarer for the same reasons, as they are consistently unpopular to run (as of writing, the last multi-day heist was the Reservoir Dogs Heist, made back at the end of 2017).
Specific Contractors
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Bain
- The Armored Transport heists (Downtown, Crossroads, Park, and Harbor) have very little cover, and some very high density cop spawns that, due to the confined roads and streets, are very close to you, meaning you will be under fire with very few breaks in assault waves. Downtown, Crossroads, and Harbor are notoriously infested with snipers, Underpass has fog that may hide the likes of Cloakers, and Park has even less cover than the others. Not only that but the deposit boxes are random, meaning you'll be carrying either jewelry (the easiest to carry) or Gold (the hardest), making traversing maps harder. And because the heist is always loud, an Escape level always has a chance to trigger.
- The Armored Transport: Train heist. There is a reason why many players avoided looting the secret blueprints from the other Armored Transport heists back in the day. This heist requires players to break through two layers of security to reach the loot. First, you have to drill or hack the train car doors, and assuming you opened a car with a vault in it, you need to open it with a thermal drill which Bain will "helpfully" drop somewhere in the canyon below, requiring a player to retrieve it with cops constantly shooting at them from the high ground. There is also too much loot in too small an area; ferrying all 40 ammo bags on foot to the drop-off point is an exercise in patience, all while being shot at by cops and snipers. The Spring Break 2017 event made this into its own heist, and was made significantly easier in both loud and stealth runs via adding in new asset options.
- Shadow Raid is a very tricky stealth heist, and it's pretty much required that there be zero margin for error. If at any point one of the numerous cameras or guards sees you, the alarm sounds, and you're completely screwed. The heist asks you to deliver 12 bags of loot, which is also a large number for such a small warehouse, and the vault door to the samurai armor cannot be opened in Solo without some AI pathing abuse (and the vault door itself cannot be closed either, meaning it raises suspicions by merely being open). There's also a helicopter that arrives around the five-minute mark that bring more guards instead of an artefact, which means if one of them turns out to be a sentry guard (a guard who doesn't move) and picks the right spot to stay idle, then you're not getting any loot in his line of sight without raising the alarm.
- GO Bank is very heavy on the randomisation:
- Stealthing this mission isn't as simple as "stop all the guards, cameras, and civilians in the map". Also, the cameras' operator is offsite (meaning you cannot disable the cameras unless you shoot them, which itself raises suspicion), and all the people in the building need to be dealt with. Then when the time comes to open the vault, it requires two keycards (located from a large list of potential spots), and takes three minutes for its lock to disengage. During this time the phone constantly rings, using RNG to determine whether or not the mission will get even harder, and civilians constantly spawn on the street, requiring the use of boards to block their vision. Similar to Big Bank, even when the vault opens, there are lasers in the way that require careful manoeuvring.
- In loud, should Plan A fail, you have to face large amounts of cops with almost no cover, and dozens of snipers surrounding you, all while assembling a cage and skyhook to collect your loot, which you must protect as the cops can take the loot out of it. When the pilot finally catches the cage (the Ace Pilot is better, but still not guaranteed), the crew must escape to the van at the parking garage through the sewer maze in a limited time with the cops on their tail.
- Car Shop:
- Like Shadow Raid, this is a stealth-only mission that starts a timer when the alarm is triggered. While the heist overall is fairly straightforward, one sequence that can annoy players is the driving sequence at the end where the players must transport the stolen cars to the docks before a timer runs out. The controls for the car are extremely bad, and it's not uncommon to lose a lot of time just trying to keep the car from repeatedly crashing into walls. That and much like the Art Gallery, the exp/cash payout is quite poor. It also briefly enters Guide Dang It! territory, as it is not explained where you need to drive the cars to - all you're told is to plant C4 on the road at one point, the game not bothering to explain that it's to blow a hole through (which you can't see from the car over the dashboard until you're driving into it), which opens up into an abandoned tunnel leading to the docks. On Mayhem and above, this heist only gives you 90 seconds to get the car from the shop to the crates (meaning you basically have to make a perfect run at it, with minor collisions; getting detected will basically end the run right there because it takes that long just to open the door to the key storage). Additionally, there can be as many as a dozen guards packed inside the relatively tiny dealership, making movement around the place extremely difficult, and that isn't even counting all the civilians that spawn inside, too! Much of this was made a little easier in Update #157, in which the computer hacking now only takes 60 seconds regardless of difficulty. In addition, the guard that sometimes guarded the manager's office is absent and none of them will patrol the offices anymore.
- The Alesso Heist, bar the whole deliberate Product Placement theme, is hated for its confusing layout and overly long bag-moving process, regardless of if you go in loud or stealth. For one, even if you know the layout, it's not uncommon for even veteran players to get lost in the corridors or behind the shops as everything looks the same, not to mention have a lot of trouble reaching the basement for the same reasons. Stealthing this heist in particular can be a challenge as the pathfinding of the guards is bad, and the mission requires going from the lowest floor to the highest, then back again, and then again, making for a frustrating experience. All the while remaining under the radar! At least the various chutes make bag-moving a lot easier, but there's a reason people don't like this heist.
- Reservoir Dogs Day 1note is a complete nightmare on higher difficulties, especially if you want to steal all the loot. The mission starts with cops spawning everywhere, and taking all of the loot in the starting section requires you to expose your face to the dozens of cops around you, and on those higher difficulties, a SWAT Turret. If you're playing on Mayhem or higher, there are multiple Skulldozers in the first waves of the police assault, making it quite likely that the heist will end prematurely if players don't focus on them. The upstairs area will almost always be filled with cops and you have to go up there at least twice to get the C4 to open the safe, and in order to get all the loot and create a zipline to streamline bag securing. The lack of practical cover on the map also doesn't help matters, especially when playing solo.
Blaine Keegan
- Crude Awakening is surprisingly low on the cop spawns for most of the heist, but the difficulty really spikes near the end where not only are players up against a Point of No Return timer lasting three minutes to get from the top of the oil rig to the tanker, but the cop spawns ratchet up to the max really quickly, with even brute force not being enough to get through them all, and players being downed among the madness not being an uncommon sight.
The Butcher
- The Bomb: Dockyard, for sneaks:
- You thought Shadow Raid was bad? Try stealthing this one! You need two keycards to open the docking gate, but on this huge map there will only ever be exactly two keycards which have a large number of potential spawns; these keycards must then be moved to the front of the map. Then you need to find a computer with the Moretta's comm frequencies; these eight computers, in two groups of four, are always in rooms with cameras and the potential for a guard or civilian to spot you while you work. Then you need to make a phone call to the captain from a specific phone, then give him GPS data from a computer, which may be on opposite sides of the map. Wait for the ship to move, which takes a few minutes, and only then can you board and begin looking for the bomb. Making it harder, the map is large and relatively open, with guards on multiple elevations who aren't always easy to spot and can see you from some very unusual angles. Civilians are numerous and strategically placed to ensure there's no easy way to navigate around without killing a few. Also, a surprise to many people, there are two security rooms - This means to take the cameras offline two guards may need to be killednote , and one of them is in a room with a large glass window in a fairly well-patrolled area.
- Brutal as stealth on Dockyard can be, it is still a stiff breeze compared to the nightmare that is doing it loud. Most of the above tasks are present, though some are modified (you need to wait for C4 to be airdropped in instead of keycards, there's one computer to hack, but the building has a power box on every outer wall that the police will doggedly pursue and force you to repair them and restart the computer). The biggest issue is that the police will send in massive amounts of Snipers who will set up on the buildings on the edges of the massive map, who will effortlessly plug you full of holes from distances that you can't even see them, even through the most powerful scopes available to the player, made worse by the lack of tall enough cover in many places. The helicopter drop and hacking portions takes a very long time, especially if you aren't willing to throw substantial money and favours towards assets that can speed them up slightly. Worst of all, however, is actually moving the bomb parts— not only are they heavy, and not only are you being shot at from almost every angle, but the path to the escape van is LUDICROUSLY long if you don't have enough favours left over for the pricey alternative escape routes. It's well over 100 meters away as the crow flies, but the actual path itself is full of long, exposed corridors that wind and in some cases require a bit of backtracking. Without a full party of four players, you either have to walk this path several times or keep throwing the bags ahead, making progress agonizingly slow, all the while the police simply do not relent, especially at the end where the assault literally never ends.
- Bomb: Forest is arguably the worst designed heist in the game, emphasis on design. Whereas the cop spawns generally aren't too bad, what is unforgivably painful is the fact that the map mostly consists of being a 35 degree hill in the middle of a forest. Lootbags slide down the hill on their own steam, and the train you have blow open, while you can jump up easily due to the hill, you can just as easily down yourself merely by jumping down. This is not a heist people like running unless they are a masochist.
The Continental
- Brooklyn 10-10 is a rather nasty heist. The main objective is to shoot down cops that chase after Charon, the person who you are saving. Surprisingly, this is not the hard part. The hard part is having to deal with the swathes of cops that rush in while you watch out for Charon in the last section of the heist. And your movement space in the levels is very, very limited and the cover is woefully inadequate, so finding a safe spot to lick your wounds is often an exercise in futility. A little while in to the heist you have to drill a pair of gates whilst under all the above-mentioned pressure (and the drills jam very frequently, given how short the ETA to completion is). There is also some extra loot that you can get out, but with all the bullets coming at you, you'd be hard-pressed to resist the urge to make a run for it.
The Dentist
- Big Bank in Stealth is very tricky. The computer hack you need to do at the start to enable the timelock is a frustration of patience, as you need to find the right computer; if it's upstairs, you may as well restart as the cover for hiding from cameras and guards is considerably weaker and the camera's can't be looped. The atrium is flooded with civilians, more of which constantly spawn in the street and walk in, and cannot be subdued without raising the alarm. When you trigger the timelock, you get a call from Jen at GenSec, who has a random chance of sending over more guards, and another guard may come in from the elevator. Once you get the timelock open you have to contend with the lasers on the vault room entrance (which to be fair, can be disabled with keycards). If you can find, or pre-place, extra keycards and use The Elevator Trick, which can rid of some or all of the lasers. However, if you're going for the "Entrapment" achievement, all that's out the window - you have to get 12 bags to the default escape out front, and you have to leave those lasers up. There is a very good reason this place has never been robbed.
- The Diamond Heist (not the one from Payday: The Heist) has a final obstacle to the titular loot, which is a puzzle involving a series of pressure plates. Players need to hack a security terminal in the room to reveal the safe path, which, while it can be reset infinitely, still relies on RNG. Should the player step on an incorrect plate, the alarm immediately sounds, gas is vented into the room, and the Diamond drops into a safe that must be drilled open. The puzzle also resets after a set period of time, and the terminal must be hacked again to generate a new path. This means that if someone takes too long retrieving the Diamond, then they run the risk of the timer resetting while they're still negotiating the pressure plates, and the alarm goes off. Even in loud, the puzzle must still be done, even if the heist goes loud, with players often preferring to deliberately trigger the plates and just drill the safe so that all four players can keep the cops at bay.
- Hoxton Breakout, while an otherwise entertaining and fair level, has some unpleasant portions:
- In Day 1, the crew must find the control room to lower bollards that are in the way of the armored truck's escape route. The issue is that there are multiple, identical doors, all of which require 20 seconds of lockpicking each, or some C4. The bad news is that there is no indication where the control room is, and the rooms are spread out. While you are given some time before the cops come to you, it's still a bit of Fake Difficulty players have never liked.
- In Day 2, there are some tasks that require far more dedication than others. The worst of the lot by far is searching for Witness Testimonies; always located at the very bottom of the level (where the main fighting arena is closer to the top), has a door that must be lockpicked, AND one that must be drilled (though both can be blown up with C4). Then the crew must search a large shelved archive for the right file, which is down to the Random Number God.
- There are four possible ways into Operations, but anywhere between two and four of them can appear. The mission is much harder if only the two side entrances are available - This means any time you have to leave Ops you have to run past the two snipers that are nearly always set up across from you and any assignment you have to do is going to take longer simply because of the added time it takes to get there. On the flipside, if all four ways are opened, it leaves the crew very vulnerable to enemy invasions from all flanks. Provided that some doors won't spawn it becomes easier and less costly to shut down the doors and save the keycards for objectives.
- Hoxton Revenge also has its fair share of frustrations in both stealth and loud:
- In stealth, You have around 8-10 guards patrolling the interior of a fairly tiny house, with very few hiding spaces, meaning you're always switching cover. This makes traversing the inside a nerve-wracking job, since a guard could turn the corner at any minute. It also makes accomplishing the objectives difficult, as they require a lot of scavenger hunting through the guard-filled house. The objectives themselves range from annoying (go to a telephone poll to talk to the FBI for the password for the panic room, where you have to avoid detection by guards) to downright horrifying (the Retinal Scanner, which requires you to bundle up the very slow moving FBI Boss and lead him to the panic room; the only saving grace is that he's always nearby).
- In Loud, it is sniper heaven, something Bain even mentions ("Consider yourself besieged"), as there are windows everywhere, meaning getting hit by a sniper is simply going to happen unless you like hiding behind snooker tables and sofas.
- The Golden Grin Casino is no walk in the park:
- When going loud, the crew must erect the BFDnote , a plasma cutter that normally requires two power sockets and enough coolant tanks to keep it running. These three factors plus the console itself must be defended, requiring all four members to address each position lest the drill restart over and over due to interference. The drill itself, even when upgraded to cut through the fastest, takes a long time. After that, it's an endless assault!
- Doing it silent is just as difficult. There are many steps in gassing the security room, involving stolen blueprints, finding three briefcases, scanning the guest rooms, and making a guy throw up. Sounds silly, but it's no joke; the guest in question must be fed a specific drink, which can be located in some of the worst spots imaginable. The guest himself may be surrounded by peeping toms or guards too. Inside the vault The Dentist's mystery loot can only be accessed by bypassing a door and a laser. The laser has a random, but predictable pattern, but the noisy drill will almost certainly attract the attention of a guard, bringing him to a now breached security room, which will make him panic. Even the lasers can be a very real problem on the way out with the Dentist's loot, as the loot is considered to be as heavy as the fusion reactor from Big Oil and the artifacts from Shadow Raid, and will slow you down to a crawl. Your timing with getting past the lasers has to be pretty much spot-on if you don't want to set off the alarm.
The Elephant
- Big Oil. This level requires total cooperation between the party and that's because of Day 2. You need to learn the right intel, and identify which of the several fusion engines is the only correct one, remembering intel and checking info on boards around the basement to figure it out, requiring trial and error to get right (something that was made more difficult, as prior to Update 100, the heist was a Pro Job, which disabled restarting). With no cooperation, players may assume it is a standard heist and begin bagging up all the machines, making the machines impossible to tell apart due to the unmarked loot bags. Making things worse is that it takes five agonisingly slow minutes to summon the chopper and have the machines checked for authenticity, so you best hold out for long enough.
- Framing Frame Day 3 is quite bad in both Stealth and Loud. It requires stealing gold from a senator (and a case of old wine too if you want Sterling's Beret) or, should you fail stealth, uploading incriminating data from his computer to the press. However, the biggest pain arises from the senator's gold vault; should the team ever be discovered, even if they've already secured one or more bags of gold, the rest must be abandoned and the stealth approach must be dropped. Thanks to Payday 2's wonky stealth mechanics, a misstep of one person can leave the team without the achievement and with only a fraction of what they could have stolen, and while you can still zipline the gold you've extracted, you have to abandon the plan straight away. And Loud is not any easier, as even if your team is geared to go loud from the offset, waiting for the hack to finish and dashing back and forth between fuse boxes to protect said hack is very tedious, to put it mildly. And that's not going into the camera spawns, where one can look directly at the vault.
- Election Day is a massive pain in the ass if the job goes loud:
- On Day 1, if you didn't tag a truck before being spotted, you're forced to hack a computer containing the shipping info, and to guarantee Day 2 proper, you have to do it twice at four and a half minutes per hack. The entire map, despite being in a shipping yard, has very little cover and the warehouses themselves are filled with a lot open skylights for the SWAT units to rappel down from. During the hacking process, if the cops shut the power off, you're forced to go outside to restore it via a circuit breaker, forcing yourself to be exposed to snipers, and exiting comes with much the same problems. It's not a surprise that people tend to stealth this day first, rather than do Loud.
- Proper Day 2 is even worse with cover when the heist goes loud. The entire warehouse is full of windows, skylights, and balconies for cops to hit you from every possible angle, and a large number of snipers always spawn near the escape van on the adjacent rooftops, which is several yards away from the main warehouse (so good luck hitting the snipers from that long a distance while the snipers themselves have pinpoint accuracy against you). The final step of the mission also has you hacking a computer to delete the surveillance footage, which can take upwards of five minutes of babysitting a computer terminal, while cops are swarming you and snipers punish you the second you crawl out of cover. And even the stealth approach isn't much better, due to the high number of guards and tight corners, luck-based crates that have the ballot machines you're after, the occasionally horrific locations of said crates (some spawn on a shelf two stories high with minimal cover, meaning that if you miss a jump, you'll likely take heavy damage or be downed instantly. Perhaps worst of all, some of the ballot machines can spawn behind gates that either need a randomly placed keycard or being drilled for upwards of a full minute in plain sight of the guards' patrol route). Regardless of whether you're stealthing or not, if you play the level on Mayhem and above, you're also forced to find a crowbar to pop open the shipping crates and said crowbar is in a random location, meaning even more searching.
- Should you fail to tag the right truck in Day 1, Day 2 is a straight shootout through a strip mall, with basically no break in sightlines or cover that isn't a wall for a hallway. The bank vault you need to drill into is a long, straight hallway that will be camped by snipers on a neighbouring balcony, making drill maintenance hellish.
- The Biker Heist is notorious for its general unfairness. While Day 2 is actually well liked by Crime Spree players, Day 1 is another matter entirely, as it is plagued with a lack of effective cover, a SWAT turret with an unfair position spanning the whole of the car park, the vehicles you get to ride out on are horrible to handle, and the Random Event system feels contrived to what amounts to Padding the heist time. While it's at least beatable on higher difficulties, it's not one to do if you haven't got much patience.
Hector
- Firestarter Day 2 is a pain in the ass to stealth, mainly because the alarm boxes you must disable are almost always located in well-patrolled hallways, making them difficult to approach. Not only that, but just the act of opening the alarm box can alert nearby guards since their programming results in them always seeing the open box before they see the player and call it in.
- Rats:
- Day 1 asks you to cook crystal meth as the meth cooks are dead, and you better hope you know Bains' verbal cues, otherwise the meth lab explodes, setting the entire second floor aflame and downing anyone caught by surprise. Bains' fumbling of ingredients or simply not combining names. This was bad enough that this got changed to use dialogue from the Lab Rats event heist, which has him much more certain and uses a more consistent vocal pattern (Simply wait for Bain to speak again after he requests an ingredient, and he will correct himself almost immediately if he's wrong, otherwise he'll say something along the lines of "I'm x% sure" or "Add it").
- If you fail to cook three bags of meth on the first day, you will have to go through an escape mission. If the trade on Day 2 goes loud (and it will if you failed on Day 1), there's a chance of a ''second'' escape mission.
- Day 2 is all up to the Random Number God. If you have little to no meth, then the gangsters will open fire and try to burn their intel before you can reach it. If you do have enough meth, the gangsters may just decide to screw you over... or the cops may get wind of the deal, so you'll have to fight your way to the intel on those occasions.
- Day 3 requires killing the remaining Mendozas and stealing their loot. However, should you fail to defuse the bombs hidden in the bus or lack the intel to do so, then any bags you failed to save will be destroyed, significantly reducing your payout.
Locke
- Brooklyn Bank is pretty similar to the Harvest & Trustee bank heists from the game's early days, in that you bust open the vault, get what you need and get out of there. But that's where the similarities end. The map is one big killzone, as the interior of the bank is cramped and likely to be flooded with cops, the second floor balcony is open to fire from the streets, and the streets have basically no cover. No matter where you go, you'll be under fire from enemies, and the poor weather conditions hides sniper fire quite easily. Oh, and just to add insult to injury, instead of the vault contents being randomized, it's the method you use to reach the vault that's randomized. You have to saw open one of the teller doors, or worse, cut a hole in the floor above the room with the vault, and blow it open with C4.* But wait, it gets worse! Now that you've reached the vault, you have to breach it using one of two ways: the infamous thermal drill, or melting the hinge with thermal paste, and pulling the door off using a winch. Plus, there's a chance the winch parts won't be stashed, leaving Locke to send the parts via rail overpass. Once they arrive, the bags containing the parts get scattered on the street, which, as mentioned prior, has virtually no cover. And once the equipment is assembled, you have to keep it from breaking down, which, given how many cops are on site, is all but ensured.
- Breakin' Feds is a multi-level, corridor-centric maze infested with guards and cameras, with more guards spawning in if you kill a few. On higher difficulties, it is entirely possible for three guards to stand in a single corridor, and chances are you'll run from one guard into a room containing two more. The worst part is Commissioner Garrett. If he spots you at any point, you automatically fail the heist and he can't be killed (doing so will fail the heist as well). You need to move him out of his office, a temporary measure, and finding the box in said office is an exercise in frustration as you have to do some sleuthing for the correct code. And then, there's a chance that you won't actually find the box there, meaning you have to trudge across the map again to find it in the Evidence room. Making things even more baffling, there's a chance that Twitch will blow up one of the walls as your escape, thus triggering a one-minute point of no return. It makes sense that the FBI offices would be this secure after Hoxton Breakout, but for anyone not 100% versed in Payday 2's wonky stealth mechanics, it is seriously aggravating and bordering on impossible. At least the objectives are actually quite simple and the door to the camera-controlling Security Room is a lockpick job rather than a keycard job.
- Simply put, Henry's Rock is the epitome of Overkill's general failings in level design for Loud heists. It suffers from little to no cover, enemy spawns everywhere, an overabundance of special spawns, objectives that involve a lot of messing about, heavy loot bags you need to shift through open spaces peppered with guards, and everything in-between. You have to hack your way out of one room (which has no cover), then into the main hall (which only has marginally more cover) before exploring two randomly selected rooms. In terms of the four rooms in question, one is somewhat easy and straightforwardnote , two are frustratingnote and one is downright infuriatingnote . After that, heave the bag back to the start, hack two turrets on either side of the helipad and then wait for Bile to show up before hoisting the bags into his helicopter... all while turrets rain fire on you, and cops spawn out the wazoo, and the final section has - you guessed it - no bloody cover!. Naturally, the heist is often derogatorily referred to as Henry's Cock, because you are going to get fucked by it.
- The White House, fittingly enough for the grand finale in the game, is absolutely brutal whether you choose to go Loud or Stealth it. If you go Loud, you have to locate certain wire boxes for Locke to hack, which aren't easily found despite being in plain sight (though the fact that they're small, cream-coloured boxes on cream-coloured walls might have something to do with it). Depending on the RNG, they'll either be in easily-defended spots, or right out in the open of the lobby being swarmed with massive amounts of cops. After that bit of unpleasantness, you fight your way to the Oval Office, where you have to wait for a drill that the cops can cut off the power to from multiple locations. And by the way, the drill can't be upgraded and cover in the Oval Office is pitifully-inadequate. And that's assuming that the cops don't just flood it with tear gas. And afterwards, you have to run to the PEOC on the other side of the map, while taking a new route leading you out into the open with lots of enemies, no cover and a van turret to go with it. Then, when you're actually in the PEOC, you have to hack a computer three times in one of the worst places in the whole game. Multiple places for cops to spawn, which they do in droves, the cops are willing to flood the room with tear gas, and once more, there's virtually no good cover. And that's ignoring the two turrets on the ceiling raining down lead on your group the whole while. Even after that, you have to run back outside, and complete yet another hack to get rid of some AA guns so Locke can pick you up! With, again, no cover. Overkill spared no detail on the endgame, clearly.
- The Secret Ending is the absolute epitome of bullshit defense in this game. It requires four players who've all completed the prerequisite activation of the artifact, which in itself is a confusing, drawn-out, arduous feat. Once you reach the entrance to the resurrection chamber, which itself requires going through the White House heist almost in its entirety, you have to defend yourself against an infinite army of Phantom Cloakers while trying to decode the language on the door four times. Screw up, you have to decode all the phrases again from the top. The Cloakers won't stop until you open the door, so if no one knows how to decode the door's writing, you're doomed. But wait! There's more! The Dentist will eventually show up at the chamber door holding Locke and Bain at gunpoint; you need to attack and kill the Dentist as soon as he comes into view, otherwise he'll kill his hostages and instantly fail your run. And then it's STILL not over! Once the Dentist is dead, you need to set several bars of gold into the indents around the chamber within a set amount of time in order to complete the heist, otherwise, you guessed it, instant failure. THEN it's over. Those who choose to stop after completing the Heist normally are absolutely blameless in the face of this.
Vlad
- Meltdown is another heist known for its difficulty. The team goes into the same Murkywater compound from Shadow Raid, taking on soldiers that are a little better armed and armored than the average cops. Then they have to look through the whole place for one container. If you're lucky, the container will be in the main building, the only area with good cover on the map. The rest of the Murkywater compound has snipers everywhere. Then you have to look for crowbars, having to find three just to complete the heist. It used to be if you wanted any extra loot, you'd have to use those crowbars to open the crates beforehand, because there wasn't an extra; a later update added a fourth crowbar, but you still have to look around for it. The loot itself leaves you incredibly slow, and the forklifts around can only carry three at most. They don't move particularly fast, either, nor are they armored, which wouldn't be a big deal except that the route to drop off the loot is a massive shooting gallery full of cops in impossible-to-reach, elevated positions. There are armored police vans with turrets guarding the way on higher difficulties, but any van will randomly decide to block off various paths to the dropoff point. The Longfellow car can make it easier, if it's found and if players bother to use it.
- Goat Simulator. As if the crossover itself wasn't contentious enough, the heist itself is quite notorious for being a pain in the ass to complete:
- Day 1 sees the crew roaming around the city in search of goats, which have had cocaine smuggled inside their rectums. Given who the contractor is (Vlad), this is entirely believable for him. Your goal? To round up all the goats and escape. Sounds simple? It isn't. The map is massive by the game's standards, requiring the Longfellow in order to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, and the goats could be anywhere on the map - hidden in buildings, trapped on scaffolding, stuck behind gates or on top of lampposts (requiring the use of a drill or saw respectively), and regardless of difficulty, one is guaranteed to appear at the top of a burning building, which is, of course, swarming with cops. As for the goats themselves, they are a rather unique type of loot in that they have a chance of damaging you. The Longfellow is also intended to help carry the goats, but it can only carry 4 at at time, so you will have to fill up the trunk, get to the semi, drop off the goats, and repeat this loop at least once more, until you have all the goats. This is made even more frustrating in that none of the goats' locations (aside from the last one), are marked out for you, only revealing themselves as you get close to them, meaning you can spend a good 5 minutes driving around waiting for goats to be highlighted. As with other driving heists, the Longfellow itself can break down if it gets too damaged, and the driving system remains atrocious. And then there is one big problem: a severe lack of cover. There are several buildings that should be used as functional cover, but they all have very large glass windows, cannot be entered, or are so small as to be ineffective. Clearly, Swan Song was meant to be abused here.
- Day 2 ratchets up the difficulty. The day begins with you having a shootout on the farm with the Honduran cartel who got you into this mess, where the map's problems quickly rear their ugly head — in that this map somehow has even less cover than Day 1 did. The farmhouse is barren, and has several holes that you can be shot through, and that's as good as the cover is going to get here. And once the cartel dies down and the police arrive, you're forced to take the goats out of the barn, and set up a fulton skyhook cage for Vlad's brother Bubba to fly in and extract them. And just like on GO Bank, the cage has no protection from the cops stealing the cargo. And if you forget even one of the goats (or it gets stolen out of the cage by cops), you'll have to do the whole process over again, and that's assuming Bubba catches the skyhook first time. Once that's done, you need to unload the Longfellow from the truck, and drive to a nearby bridge. Once you arrive, you'll find that the bridge has been turned by the cops, and you are once again surrounded by them. You have to get into the security room using a drill, or a saw or C4 if you happened to bring them, and just to rub it in, once you get in, you finally get some cover in the form of some shutters! Until you activate the bridge... at which point the shutters raise up, and you are once again a sitting duck. Once the bridge is in place, you can finally get back in the Longfellow and make a run for it, leaving the madness behind you. At least you'll get an above average payday for your efforts.
