It finally happened.

After months of delays, thousands of rude comments on Rockstar forums and social media, more delays, and several gigantic patches, Heists are in Grand Theft Auto Online. And it feels like those delays were worth it. These new missions feel like what Rockstar promised in that initial trailer. These missions are just as good as the Heist missions in Grand Theft Auto V's main story, except they're perfectly balanced for multiplayer.

The Heist Update brought a lot of good things to GTA Online, and an almost equal amount of frustrating things. Now that I've finished every Heist mission with my team, consider this my review of GTA Online's Heists and the content added to The Heist Update.

Good:

-Co-operate! I played through every Heist mission with the same group of three friends, and I feel this is the ideal way to do so. The missions are so well designed for co-operative play. I can't imagine even completing them without trusting and communicating frequently with teammates.

You know how at E3, Ubisoft shows co-operative multiplayer games with terrible stage “demos”? The ones where the Ubisoft employees pretend like they're having spontaneous battle conversations during the game but they come off as weird and unnatural? The Heists in GTA Online force you to have battle conversations. Without even thinking about it, my team started whipping up plans in the middle of the mission, pairing into groups, and shouting which areas to cover. You can't lone wolf the Heists or you'll die, and it was remarkable how well the game makes you plan together and play tactically.

-Cutscenes.

Each Heist mission comes with a LOT of cutscenes. There's new characters, new voice acting from returning characters, and even fun things for the created characters to do. The last part is my favorite, as they actually give your voiceless player characters some personality. They still don't speak, but they have really amusing mannerisms and reactions to other characters, especially Lester.

-Daily Objectives & new Activities.

This is my favorite part of the Heist Update. Every day, you're given three random objectives to complete. Completing all three gives you a good boost in experience points and money. There's also new random events like blowing up an airplane or car that appears on the map, which inevitably leads to a fight with other players because there's only one airplane/car to blow up in the world.

I found the game a little bland after playing for several months and buying everything I wanted. I rarely try to matchmake into Races or Missions because it takes too long. But for Daily Objectives, I have a reason to boot up the game regularly. They even continue to reward you for completing Daily Objectives consistently for a week or month! Also, it's a good way to get cash in a world with lots of overpriced goods and missions that underpay you...more on that later.

-MONEY. Heist missions get you more money than the average GTA Online activity. The game has been continually adding new vehicles and properties that cost WAY too much money, but Heists have evened the odds with some very nice cash bonuses. Well, almost evened the odds.

Bad:

-Mission Design. Some of the Heist missions have absurdly punishing failure states. The one that comes to mind first is “Bikes” in the Series A Funding Heist. Skip to 25 minutes:

This portion of the setup is designed like an early 2000s stealth game: if you get spotted by the extremely perceptive AI at all, or if they spot any of the people you kill, you will fail. Even while communicating constantly with my team, we found this mission difficult to pass.

Checkpoints are highly inconsistent, but mostly they are not in your favor. When failing parts of a mission, we were often sent back to do long portions again, losing up to 10 minutes of progress at a time. This problem seemed to get worse as the missions got longer and more difficult; the checkpoints just kept getting further apart.

Also, there are many situations where playing smart and communicating won't help. There are instances where enemies will spawn directly next to you and kill you, even if you thought you cleared out a safe area. There are areas in Heist missions where enemies infinitely respawn but you are not told this is happening, so you waste a lot of time trying to clear an area. During car chases, cars would occasionally spawn out of nowhere, causing a nearly unreactable situation where you WILL crash. In the final few Heist missions where you're on motorcycles, that last point would lead to death.

-Too few lives, not enough health.

The realistic damage in singleplayer Grand Theft Auto V made sense. You died in a few shots but so did your enemies. In GTA Online Heists, it feels unbalanced. You're even MORE fragile than you are in the main story, and the enemies have more health and deal more damage. Playing on Normal difficulty was a frustrating experience at times because you die too quickly to react and health/armor pickups are extremely limited.

Your team has a limited pool of lives, and if they run out you fail. The odd thing is not every person gets an extra life: you typically get 1 or 2 for your entire team. It's a very harsh limitation for Normal difficulty.

There is the option to carry armor in your inventory, but after dying repeatedly on a mission (which will happen on your first playthrough) that runs out and you cannot visit Ammu-Nation to restock in the middle of a mission.

There are missions where you must focus on driving while being shot by enemies who have almost perfect accuracy. So you have to drive, shoot them, and constantly heal so you won't fail. And good luck if they shoot out one of your tires!

I feel like the Heist missions would be better if you could take more damage and each player had one extra life. Unfortunately, it's probably too late to change something as fundamental as damage values in GTA Online.

-Unlockables are still too expensive.

It is nice that you consistently unlock new vehicles when completing Heist missions and Setups. This also makes the consistent criticism of GTA Online even more apparent: you never have enough money. A motorcycle I unlocked for finishing the final Heist costs $750,000. After finishing that Heist and getting a pretty decent amount of cash, I don't even have half of that. A High-End Safehouse costs $500,000, and that's one of the most expensive, best safehouses you can get!

The balance between the money you gain in GTA Online and the prices of items is still completely messed up. People accused Rockstar of doing this early on to push people to buy their Shark Card microtransactions for real money, and I'm beginning to see these complaints as valid. Even with a pretty good way to make money in Heists, you'll have to grind them and play them repeatedly to get enough money for the cool items they added.

I don't know if I want to revisit the Heists soon or at all. Dying repeatedly because enemies have amazing aim and you have no health wasn't fun. Retrying large portions of missions because of bad checkpoints wasn't fun. It got to the point where I was so frustrated at retrying a Heist over and over that I couldn't appreciate the bombastic finales. I was happier that it was finally over than I was about seeing the cool payoff and getting a load of cash.

Heists were fun for a first playthrough, but the new gameplay modes, Daily Objectives, and customization items are the actual highlights. My question is where can GTA Online go from here? Rockstar has done a good job of building in a lot of replay value into the Heists with bonus objectives and new Awards to achieve, but will we ever see an update this major again? I'd like to see new single player expansions, but the way Rockstar talks about that makes it seem like that will never happen. It would be disappointing if they skipped that because there's no way to sell microtransactions in single player.

I hope the next big expansion is the Grand Theft Auto V equivalent of “The Ballad of Gay Tony” or “The Lost and Damned”. As of now, I'm looking forward to more Grand Theft Auto V and less GTA Online.