I stumbled across this game which on the surface, does look like a PAYDAY clone though stripped down into a single player experience. The free price tag is what made me give it a go and here are my honest thoughts about it...

Let's start with the pros:

This is actually not that bad. The gameplay is good, the tasks are varied, the heists/levels vary, and the enemies are actually quite competent in taking you down if you don't know how to deal with them. There is also quite the wide variety of enemies each with a different kind of playstyle or attack method in hopes to take you down.

You will start out with basic weapons and tools (like usual) though due to the game being a strictly single player experience, your kit comes with a variety of abilities that honestly really make you feel like a one man army or supersoldier to take these missions on. You will be able to spawn drones that will hover around and guard/shoot/distract enemies, a suit ability that may allow you to move faster, increase dodge chance, drastically increase your defense, or even increase your health regen. On top of that you will get a shoulder mounted weapon that at the start will fire a powerful laser but you can replace that with a three shot burst, or even a flamethrower like attachment. And if you are seeing the trailer and noticing your health going down so much the numbers on it are your lives technically. Once the bar goes down completely you will go down one number. But throughout the map (and even enemy drops) you will find first aid kits that will allow you to bring that number back up by one. And you will find these things very often so you will be able to quickly get yourself back up onto your feet and stay healthy if you keep an eye on those kits.

The cash you get from your missions you can spend on better weaponry, armor, augmentations, drones, melee weapons, among other things. While I do not see a way to upgrade your weapons stats (which is fine because these weapons, especially on the higher end, will get the job done with little to no issues.) you can upgrade those weapons through some of the armors as few of them will actually buff certain weapons on top of giving more health and lives.

If you are wondering about an end-game, there is one thing you can buy called an operator rank where with each level you will increase your health and the amount of money you get from missions by a small amount with the price slowly increasing but being drastic enough that you will definitely have to work for it... (Kind of like a prestige system but you don't lose a single thing buying it.)

14 missions, the ability to run a random campaign of 3 to 5 random missions, with a difficulty setting that increases the amount/value of the loot you will find makes it feel rewarding as you progress and get better gear and handle the tougher missions.

Now for some cons, which there are honestly few to none of in my opinion but here is one I personally find an issue with...

Now 14 missions is enough variety, but the issue I am having is if you want to get your operator rank to max level which is 30, which also grants some extra buffs at certain milestones, the issue I have with it is that the latter end of the missions give more cash, granted with the mission being a few extra steps longer and time consuming (but since no level is like longer than 10 minutes, 15 MAX but you would have to be not paying attention to your mission to get a time like that.) you may end up playing the latter missions repeatedly to get the most money with the least amount of time. Now for PAYDAY fans and vets, this is pretty much the typical and the norm...

This brings me to the real issue I have which is the campaigns. What this does is it gives you 3 to 5 random missions pulled from the pool of 14 which is completely fine, but my issue with that is that there is no REAL incentive to play a campaign. What I mean by that is if you get 'Cash Express', there is no bonus for completing it in a campaign compared to just outright choosing the mission to play. Now if a campaign gave an outright bonus to the loot found in every mission stacking on top of the difficulty and operator rank boost then it could get one (and me personally) to play campaign mode constantly, because it would at least be a bit more rewarding to tackle on whatever the game throws at you instead of doing a particular mission to help optimize your cash intake.

The bonus does not have to be much either, maybe a +10% for the 3 day, a +20% for a 4-day, then a +30% bonus for a 5-day campaign that would stack on top of the difficulty and your operator boost would motivate me to play that mode and mix up my gameplay a bit...

But I guess that would be the game designer/developer's choice, and this is just my thoughts and opinions on how I feel about campaign mode in particular, the game itself is genuinely a good experience and one that I don't regret playing.

I'm trying to get myself to get to operator rank 30 but only sitting at level 7 at the moment as I spent most of my time trying to get the best gear (or best weapons for personal taste) so that way I can try to push through to it.

Good game with LOTS of potential. I highly recommend it for the nice low price of free.

This game definitely feels really cheap with all assets being from the same asset store bundle that goes on sale on humble bundle all the time, but for a free game it's actually quite fun. Lots of heists, they are pretty different from one another, and most of them don't even blatantly copy payday 2.

I tried some heist games in the past but they never entertained me for more than a few runs.
This indie game instead, with barebone UI, simple graphics and sounds, kept me hooked until the end of the last mission.
I think it does some things better than the more popular and bigger budget games, most notably the pace of combat and challenge, and the various tasks alongside that, is perfect.
Level design is also excellent.
To be a free game, developed presumably with a very low budget, AI is also surprisingly good and the amount of content is spectacular - there are loads of levels and upgrades, it's evident how much work - and love - was poured into this project.
Congratulations: this is really good. It deserves to be way more popular.
Found with the discovery queue.