The kinetic co-op heister comes from GTFO developer 10 Chambers and its former Payday architects.
Den of Wolves makes me feel like I’m drowning. In my brief hands-on demo of the upcoming sci-fi heist game, I found that when the enemies start to push from every direction, the best you can do is huddle close to your teammates and try to stay alive.
We failed near the final hurdle in our first attempt at a Den of Wolves heist, but pulled it out of the bag for the second, extracting with nearly empty weapons, bags full of loot, and a mission well done. Live or die in Den of Wolves, you’ll do it alongside your teammates.
That singular focus on the squad feels like 10 Chambers doing what it was made to do. The studio was founded by developers who conceptualised and designed Payday and Payday 2. With its first game, GTFO, 10 Chambers made a name for itself as a studio that wants to make co-op games at their most punishing.
Now the developer is « back on that heist shit », as CEO and co-founder Ulf Andersson declared in an interview with me in 2022.
Like the Payday games, Den of Wolves is about criminals trying to accumulate wealth, but it deviates with its futuristic setting. Midway island has become a lawless corporate haven where companies screw each other over relentlessly for profit. That’s concerningly close to some real world cities, but add sci-fi tech, body modifications, and a whole lot of neon lights, and Den of Wolves is giving Cyberpunk instead of the standard cops and robbers setup.
My favourite bit is the body horror aspect that sees human beings used to store data, brains being the only way to protect information from AI hackers. It’s like Johnny Mnemonic but instead of boyishly cute Keanu Reeves you’ve got people encased in a goopy cell, waiting for you to come rob their mind palaces.Come prepared
That’s what we’re here to do during this first hands-on. In this case, we’ll be cosying up to a gangster to get access to a vault containing one of those human USBs before betraying him and his gang to lift the data right out of his noggin.
Before that, we’re performing a smaller heist to get our hands on some hunter killing robots to facilitate that double-cross. Each main heist in Den of Wolves will have preparatory missions like this, which will change how the final showdown plays out.
