Den of Wolves Hands-on Preview: Payday Meets Inception in This Mind-Bending Co-op Heist Simulator

It honestly shocks me that there aren’t more heist games, because I can think of few experiences more awesome than carrying out my boyhood lawbreaking fantasies with the lads. Thankfully, after more than a decade away from the glamor and gunpowder of criminal activity, a group of familiar faces behind Payday: The Heist and Payday 2 have taken a break from making the insanely difficult co-op shooter GTFO to go back to what they do best. And that is, make games where you and your friends work together to break the law by pulling off a series of elaborate and high-risk burglaries for no other reason than to satisfy your wanton greed. But where the Payday series was and continues to be a fairly standard game about robbing banks, the upcoming Den of Wolves adds a compelling sci-fi world with a gritty, cyberpunk flair, multi-phase planning and execution of break-ins where you can decide exactly how you want to pull it off, and most importantly: the ability to dive into the minds of others to steal the valuable secrets hidden within their brains. If that doesn’t get your blood pumping, I don’t know what will!

Den of Wolves takes place in the extremely dark near future where the world’s technology ecosystem imploded due to hackers, and corporations were given free rein to do whatever they pleased to combat the crisis, including but not limited to human experimentation, and building dangerous and unpredictable technologies (y’know, your basic cyberpunk hellscape stuff) so long as they kept their activities contained to the newly minted libertarian dystopia and Andrew Ryan’s wet dream: Midway City. Naturally this leads to corporations storing their data straight inside totally unhackable human brains, transforming the host to all that delicious data into a wonderful little flesh battery, from the looks of it. But we’re hardened criminals, guys. Are we really gonna let a super creepy meat computer locked away in a bank vault get in the way of us pulling off heists? I think not!

To that end, Den of Wolves has you and three friends planning and carrying out a series of felonies in Midway City, where you’ll overcome those pesky brain-based security systems by mind-melding with victims to rip off their secrets and make off with the loot. My demo focused on a single operation where my crew and I planned and executed a high-stakes assault on a bank currently under new management by a very aggressive street gang with power and tech enough to rival world governments – pretty nasty stuff. In this particular case, our plan of attack was to use a swarm of drones acquired from a previous robbery to ambush a number of these gang members to gain entrance into the reinforced stronghold, then go loud as possible, shooting up the place with reckless abandon until we found what we were looking for. In this instance, the big prize was the data inside someone’s head who was locked safely away inside a vault and scarcely resembled a human anymore; truly just straight nightmare fuel, if I’m being honest.

Much of this caper went off in a way any Payday fan will immediately recognize: we used a variety of automatic weapons to smash and grab everything in sight while holding off waves of folks who were quite mad about being ripped off, deploying and repairing drills that break every couple seconds even in a sci-fi future, apparently. Naturally, cooperation was critical to our success, as we laid down cover fire for one another, revived downed teammates who got caught in a bad spot, and called out to one another as we heaved bags full of loot across the ruined fortress. There really wasn’t a whole lot new about the foundation of this heist game, aside from maybe the consumable equipment abilities that let my squad do things like throw down a temporary barrier that provided some limited cover in the middle of a fight.

But all that changed when the bank vault doors slid open, revealing the prize we were chasing after: a caterpillar-like human lump locked away to contain valuable secrets. After a little bit of hacking, we lept from the physical plane and into the mind of this person to hack open their brain and make off with their secrets. Now, I don’t know what exactly is going on in the mind of this clearly and understandably disturbed individual, but what we found waiting for us inside his dome was an unsettling and surreal series of landscapes that we had to leap between to gain access to their thoughts. And since we were on a timer, we couldn’t afford to take our time or slip up, lest we get booted back out to the real world and have to continue to hold out against enemies before getting another crack at it.

This was the only brain I dove into in my limited time with Den of Wolves, but I was told that every mind would present unique challenges to play against, not just the high-stakes platforming of our current mission. And while it remains to be seen just how interesting or how much variety these will have, this section completely shook up an otherwise familiar formula in a seriously cool way. I love shooting at rival criminal gangs and robo cops as much as the next convicted felon, but it was really neat to jump back and forth between reality-based FPS combat and completely bizarre cooperative platforming in a geometrically impossible world of imagination. That really helps to set this one apart from what I worried might just be a Payday sequel with a cyberpunk skin plastered over it. Instead, it seems Den of Wolves plans on taking some real risks and trying stuff that makes it weird and interesting, and I’m absolutely down for that.

In between trips into our poor, troubled victim’s mind, we were yanked right back out to where we left off, only milliseconds apparently having elapsed in meat space while we went parading around in someone’s noggin. After jumping back into his skull for a few additional servings of deeply uncomfortable jumping puzzles, we got what we came for and made our exit by blowing up some windows with high explosives and diving out to what I can only hope was some Assassin’s Creed-style hay piles waiting conveniently placed just below.

Though Den of Wolves borrows quite a bit from Payday and other crime games, the setting, elaborate planning mechanics, and especially its surreal mind-hacking mechanics all made me feel pretty confident that developer 10 chambers’ return to the wonderful world of heisting has a good chance of being another stunning success. Here’s hoping they can pull off the score of a lifetime when this thing eventually makes its way into early access on PC.