A Downgrade from Its predecessors in almost every way.

A lot of the features from the second game were either removed or completely ruined, to name a few:

1) The Pre-planning screen was turned into the lobby screen and if you are the host you cannot change the privacy settings for whatever reason, you can only kick people, but only when you've joined the game, if you're still at the "lobby" you cannot kick anyone.
Each player can only place 1 asset, meaning that if you're playing solo you can only have 1 asset, and the assets have to be either brought from an in-game vendor (as it's the case for the generic favors and a few of the DLC-heist specific favors), or have a chance to be unlocked randomly unlocked (in the case of most heist-specific favors) at the end of a heist.

in PAYDAY 2, the lobby and pre-plan screens are separate entities, if you are the host you can set the lobby to private, friends-only or public and put a level restriction on the lobby
The pre-planning screen has two versions, one which only places down a few generic assets, and the other one which lets you place down whatever assets you want, and said assets can be brought from the pre-planning screen without any problem.

2) The Team AI took a huge hit for no reason, in 2 you could tell them to stand still in a place, give them different weapons and skills, and even change their cosmetics,
While here you cannot command them at all, nor can you customize them, they can only carry bags and drop an ammo bag at the end of an assault wave.

And since we're on the topic of AI, they made the cop AI even dumber than before,
The Cloaker can't throw smoke bombs, dropkick people or hide behind cover, all he does is jump from a vent in the ceiling and run to the nearest human player, resulting in him getting shot 9/10 times,
The Taser needs to switch to his taser to tase you, which takes a few seconds to do so and spawns alone, which results in you not getting tased most of the time,
The Bulldozer is incredibly slow and runs away after an assault ends, and when you find one you can easily melt him in a few seconds,
Snipers take a long time to shoot and if you get close to them they will pull out a pistol.

3) Originally you had to level up the guns to unlock attachments, but fortunately they removed that in the April 2026 update, however most guns lack any sort of unique attachments, and for the few that do usually are reskins of existing attachments, the AKM, for example, has the generic AR-15 Stocks, Grips and Muzzle Devices that most guns have, meanwhile in 2 the AKM had unique stocks, grips, suppressors and mags that were only available on AK-Family guns.
The weapon stats are also displayed with bars instead of actual numbers, which PD2 also did at launch but they changed that after a while.

4) The Heists have next to no RNG
For example, PAYDAY 2's Big Bank has 4 different spots for the vault door and the vault itselt has 2 different appearances, the server room could spawn in 3 different places, the door leading to the vault room could spawn in either the first or second floor, the maintenance room on the roof has 3 spots, this is true for most heist which have some sort major RNG element. in PD3 The most you get is a keycard or the code for a vault being different, and nothing else.
The April 2026 update also reworked No Rest for the Wicked, which added some variety for the heist, which is a step in the right direction but the remaining 16 heists in the game still lack any sort of RNG and are incredibly boring, Road Rage is just escorting a truck from point B to A and then running from point A to B, Gold and Sharke is a worse version of Big Bank with no customization, Under the Surphaze is just hunting for tiny QR codes to open a room full of AI Generated paintings.

You also need a third party account and a internet connection so Starbreeze can sell your data to play the game, if you don't have this account or aren't connected to the internet you cannot play the game, the only reason you even need a account is for a Fortnite-esque Item Shop that is currently in the game, but it doesn't have any paid items yet, I'm not joking, a premium currency was leaked back in 2023 and people found items that were meant to be sold on the shop in the game files, if this was a free to play game i would understand, but c'mon Starbreeze this is a Thirty Dollars game with DLC, not a mobile gacha game.

Don't buy this game, just stick with 2 and The Heist.