OVERKILL Announces ‘Payday 2’/’Hotline Miami’ Crossover

I’m going to need a new pair of pants after this one.

If it hasn’t been pretty obvious, Payday 2 is a pretty awesome game, and the dev team’s dedication to and fairly consistent stream of updates to the game (the PC version, anyway) really makes the game stand out as one of the better experiences you can have in multiplayer shooters these days.

After all, I got involved in the game when it went live on PlayStation Plus (something else you should totally have, if you don’t), and picked up the PC version during a free weekend when the Election Day heist was added.

Since then, we’ve gotten several packs of additional weapons, new features, updates to the stealth systems, and more than a few new heists. Hot off the heels of the announcement of the Dentist heists (and an rather unexpected Walking Dead trailer, as well), OVERKILL has released another video announcement of a new heist, and this one really has people buzzing.

Hotline Miami is widely considered to be one of the best games you could possibly add to your collection across a number of platforms. It’s a veritable ballet of death, carefully constructed violence of a very special sort, and one that is unexpectedly easy to associate with the world of Payday.

See, you spend the majority of the first game as a sort of hitman only known as “Jacket”. You receive mysterious phone calls telling you to visit various addresses. Upon arrival, you don an animal mask and murder the absolute crap out of everyone inside—which is almost always exclusively comprised of Russian mobsters.

In Payday 2, you’re contracted to perform various jobs for—you guessed it—a freshly unjailed Russian mafioso named Vlad, whose jobs often involve considerably more strongarmed tactics or petty rivalries than the other jobs.

While the combination can strike as rather unusual—the Payday gang is rather more highbrow than Jacket is, generally favoring clever execution and precision over brute force and overt violence. The marriage here is unusual, so I can’t really offer any speculation as to what the heist might be aside from the bits you’ll pick up from the trailer. Something about money not going where it was supposed to, and they bring Jacket in to really…uh…hammer the point home.

This makes sense in a lot of other ways, too: masks play a vital role in both games in some way or another, and though there was gunplay in Hotline Miami, it had a much stronger melee focus, so we can fairly safely expect new melee weapons to debut as a part of this, as well.

Hotline Miami also featured one of the greatest soundtracks produced for a game in recent memory, and given that Payday also has a penchant for awesome music while heisting, and this is a marriage made in heaven—we’ll just have to see how the heist plays out and just how unique it turns out to be, at least from a Payday perspective.

If you haven’t played Payday: The Heist or Payday 2 yet, you should consider signing up for the official group on Steam, as they’re offering Payday: The Heist for free for their Crimefest celebration. Hotline Miami is also on sale a signification portion of the time, and will easily prep you for the upcoming sequel, Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number.

It’s not going to be a long wait, either, the DLC is pegged for release on Spetember 30th. I’ll be waiting with bated breath for more details, and you’ll know as soon as I do what’s happening. Until then, revel in this trailer with all its terrible fake Russian-accented glory.