Den of Wolves hands-on preview — Get ready to have your mind blown

William Gibson, famed author of the book Neuromancer and father to many terms like “Cyberpunk”, “Matrix”, and “Internet” once said “Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were”.  When the problem is big enough, those willing to offer a solution are often given a great deal of latitude, and with that sort of permission, ethics are the first thing to go.  In the year 2035, AI has grown completely out of our control and corporations have stepped up with the promise to “fix the problem”.  All they ask in return is their own unregulated haven to drive technological advancements without oversight or control.  Sure, that kind of unfettered advancement can solve an issue, but it also creates incredible opportunities – that’s where you come in.  Welcome to Den of Wolves.

Den of Wolves comes to us from Stockholm-based developers Ten Chambers.  The team at Ten Chambers are industry co-op heist veterans, with their cofounders being responsible for games like Payday and Payday 2: The Heist.  After breaking away, they also brought us the incredible tense co-op semi-horror stealth/shooter GTFO.  Now they’re ready to, as it says on the back of their jackets, “Get back on that heist shit”, and I recently got the very first hands-on opportunity with their upcoming game, Den of Wolves, and let me tell you – the trailers don’t do this game justice.

Between 2035 and 2097, corporations were granted permission to take over Midway Island – the 2.4 square mile atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  Here they built a sprawling technological marvel of a city, free from pesky things like regulations, ethical boundaries, environmental concerns, human rights, or anything else that would get in the way of progress and the almighty dollar.  They did what they said they would do and solved the AI crisis, but they certainly reaped all of the ill-gotten side benefits in the process.

The problem with AI in 2035 was that it relied on traditional networking.  Routers, switches, ports, and processors can all be hacked and hijacked in various ways that would allow AI to exploit it faster than mankind could patch and remediate.  These megacorporations simply wired in the one thing that AI couldn’t crack – a human mind.  Suspending a human body (nobody asked if they were willing) in a viscous fluid and drilling cables into their skulls, these floating meatbags provided all of the networking and processing power needed to run Midway City’s corporations, and without the threat of artificial intelligence breaking in as you need physical access to the subject to even attempt a breach.  The problem is that these companies were busy looking at AI and forgot that good old fashioned people are the far bigger threat.

The one thing about power is that it also creates paranoia.  In the drive to compete, corporations become suspicious of their neighbors.  On an island where there is no law, they’re willing to pay top dollar for surgical hits against their competitors.  Industrial espionage, sabotage, property theft, assassination, and general mayhem are all merely line items on your services list for the company willing to pay the most for the work.  As the Den of Wolves, you are loyal only to yourself, and your target today might be your client tomorrow.  Playing both sides has never been more profitable, or dangerous.

Our hands-on time with the game kicks off with what the team is calling a “prep mission”.  Prep missions can be handled over a short lunch break and serve to roll up to a larger heist.  Like any good bank job movie, it’s the part where the team figures out how many drills they’ll need, if any special weapons are needed, or if you just need more target intel.  Your team gathers around a table, you pick your loadout (primary and secondary weapons, any special equipment like a deployable shield or proximity mines, etc.) and prep to roll out.  The primary heist in this case is called the Bokken Arms Heist, which immediately makes sense when the elevator for this prep mission opens.

A bokken is a wooden practice sword, approximating the weight and size of a samurai sword.  As the doors open we see several beautiful lacquered katchū (all armor is katchū, with multiple variants based on materials and configuration) are contained in glass cases, complete with ornate kabuto (helmets) and intricate details like rivets and macramé cords (odoshi) made from leather and braided silk. I snap back to reality and remember that I’m holding a machine gun and that I have a mission to accomplish – I need to stop admiring the decorations.  We’re here to grab a special sniper drone that’ll come handy in our main mission, with the big bags of cash and any other gear being secondary targets of opportunity.  A red shimmer around my body indicates that my active stealth camouflage is working correctly.  Moving slowly, crouched or otherwise, will keep that invisibility intact, but running or getting too close to a guard will break that, so I’d need to be mindful of my distance.  

Our mission starts off quiet, as any good heist should.  We can silently take out some of the guards or just avoid them, but our kabuki-style masks also reveal sensor reads, such as the sprawling tentacles reaching out from a heavily armored sentry show the sensor package from his tech. (The style is lifted straight from their previous game GTFO, with these outstretched lines reminding me of the Scout enemy – the only foe that doesn’t “sleep” in that game)  He’d be far harder to take out…something we’d immediately find out as one of our crew tipped off a guard, forcing us to go loud.  They say no plan survives first contact, and that’s a saying for a reason. With a sigh I watch the gorgeously-rendered armor slump to the ground, the glass case reduced to shards as the bullets begin to fly.

Combat in Den of Wolves has PUNCH to it.  As I put down the guards in the room, I can practically feel the impact of the rifle in my chest – the audio is already pretty fantastic ahead of Early Access.  With no more time to admire the scenery, we all four rush towards the vault.  The layout is a typical office building, so we know it’s near the back of the space.  Reaching the vault, I pull out a spider-drone and attach it to the door.  It reaches out with its mechanical arms and begins to jab at the weak points on the door. Spinning around, the four of us immediately know what to do – we have to hold this space, and it’s about to get very busy in this room.  Over comms we call out lanes and sight lines as I hold the vault door.  Keeping the drone running between gunfights, the door eventually slides open. We now have a choice…

Greed. Risk-versus-Reward. Opportunism. Avarice. Whatever you want to call it, we have six bags and a drone in this room, and only four people to carry it all.  Our only required item is the drone, but the bags are sitting right there if we just take a little more time. They say time is money, but at the end of the day, money is money.  I pick up the bags, carry them to the front of the vault, and drop them for the team to begin ferrying them to the evacuation point. We’re taking it ALL. 

Every mission, prep and main, has primary and secondary objectives.  You can’t spend any amount of money if you’re dead, but poor people struggle to buy the gear for their next heist.  Figuring out how much risk you’d like to take before the heist sounds great, but when the bag is on your back, your priorities might change.  In this case it’s a short run from the  vault to the back door, but this question would come up again when we hit the main heist.  We run our six bags and the drone to the exit and celebrate our first victory.  The mission took a mere 10 minutes but it felt like we were in a firefight for double that amount.  

I want to pause a second and call out the incredible work of Simon Viklund.  He’s the Music & Audio Director for 10 Chambers, but you’ve heard his work in GTFO, Payday: The Heist and Payday 2, Brother: A Tale of Two Sons, both Bionic Commando reboot titles, both Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter games, and more.  The guy makes music that makes you sit up and notice, and it’s with no exaggeration that I say that Den of Wolves is some of his best work so far. Collaborating with Greg Ellis (Argo, Transformers, Godzilla), Viklund has given us a soundtrack that combines grinding techno, drum-and-bass, electronica, and some super cool ethnic instruments that sounds unique and just plain badass. Given the mission is taking place in a Japanese-decorated office, it’s no surprise to hear heavy drums and wooden flutes slipping in between driving bass.  Frankly, I can’t describe it enough – listen to this first track entitled “Inject” for yourself.

While we didn’t get to play it for ourselves, we got a brief overview of how the branching systems in Den of Wolves will work. The scenario could be that there are three engineers capable of cracking a particular algorithm, for example.  We run a prep mission and it goes badly, but we manage to kidnap one of them. The other two go underground as they now know they are targets, sealing off those branches.  You likely will be able to complete your mission without them, but might take much longer or require some additional tools or information source.  Main heists can and will link to other heists, so it’ll be interesting to see how these interweave. 

Back at the planning table with our sniper drone and now flush with cash, we prep for the main heist.  A massive megacity structure has been taken over by a scumbag named Gripjaw.  Gripjaw and his goons have seized the bank inside one of these megastructures and is using it to deal a drug called “Idzer”.  He promises that he has some schematics that will help us hack the mind of a man named “Bowman” – the poor soul in the trailer you can see below:

The mission sounds easy on paper.  Somewhere in this bank, Bowman and his fragile little mind hold the keys to this bank. Locked somewhere inside his grey matter is the intel on a top-secret location.  The plan is to set up a trade deal with Grimjaw, the leader of Sin, a Jotun Guard cell controlling the STAC Complex in the Promise district. Instead of a direct assault, the paln is to ambush Grimjaw using the Colibri Drones hidden inside an Idzer container on location. Grimjaw believes the container holds schematics for a compound that could enhance the efficiency of Shanti production, a drug the Jotun Guard traffics.  We agree to the handoff, and we’ve agreed to meet up with him at the bank, but our Wolves have other plans.  We infiltrate using a helicopter and walk in – after all, we’re invited guests.  Schematics in hand, Gripjaw betrays us before we have the chance to betray him – I guess there’s no honor among thieves. Guns are drawn, bullets start flying, and it’s time to “get on that heist shit”. 

The best part about ALL of this is that it’s the direct result of previous mission choices.  Instead of the bait and switch, we could have simply assaulted the bank directly, hitting the Jotun forces and breaching the doors by force.  Every mission has these branching choices, and they’re yours to make. 

Back in the bank, to gain access to the secure dome Bowman is floating in, we'll need to recover three keys that can reside inside of any number of vaults that dot the first or second floor in this bank.  It’s random, so we’ll have to pop each one with spider drones and hope we get lucky.  Before the mayhem, we’d already decided that we’d split into pairs and bisect the bank, eventually meeting up in the center.  Once we’d opened half the vaults, the second team would break off and head up to the third floor to prep our escape.  On that third floor is a sealed office that can open the armored shutters that cover the bulletproof windows we’d be using as our exit.  My team would plant the explosives on that window to create the opening.  

The gang has gotten wind of the heist by this point and are sending their goons to stop us from opening the vaults.  We came prepared, using deployable shields to give us and our spider drones cover and creating chokepoints where we could mow them down before they fanned out to flank us.  As we recovered the first key, that pesky decision came up again.  There are a staggering 35 bags of loot in these vaults, and once again only four of us to carry them out.  If we stick around to get 'em all, that’ll be a very long time with an ever-increasing amount of pissed off enemies pouring in.  We don’t know what kind of firepower they’d eventually bring to bear, so we’re back to that risk-vs-reward question.  I give a nod to my partner and we start a criss-cross caravan to shuttle all of the bags to the evac point – we didn’t come this far to leave with anything less than everything.

It doesn’t take long before we are swimming in enemies from all directions.  Scavenging ammo from crates and the dead, the clock is ticking.  With the third key recovered, the second team runs up to the control room and opens the massive dome that consumes the center of the room.  Knowing that it’s never as easy as all this, I use the weapon I’ve been quietly holding this entire time – I pepper the front of the walkway out of the dome with proximity mines and crouch in cover to spring a trap of my own.  Sure enough, the leader of this gang that just couldn’t possibly stop bragging for one damned second while we were coming in to do this deal was hiding inside the dome. He thought he was slick, but shooting him square in the chest pissed him off enough for him to fall directly into my trap.  Stepping on four mines at once sundered his armor and left him critically wounded. Four blasts to the chest with my shotgun at near point blank range left him a twisted heap of augmented flesh, but more importantly – he finally stopped running his mouth. We now only had one last task, and frankly – it’s the golden key that makes Den of Wolves something nobody will see coming.

The human mind is a mystery.  We’ve been studying it for centuries and it’s still as much guesswork as it ever has been, and Den of Wolves leaps on that concept.  We hear over comms that we need to prepare for “The Drop” in 3…2…1.  Taking cover behind an overturned desk, I hear a whooshing sound and see my vision narrow into some sort of portal or funnel. Pulling me inside, I find myself transported to some sort of red-tinted otherworldly space. Chunks of what appears to be office buildings are floating in a bizarre liminal space, a digital clock readout counting down in the corner of my vision. I’m not sure why it’s counting down, but I can’t imagine it’s anything good. I race towards the edge and leap semi-weightlessly towards the next chunk.  As my feet touch the busted concrete floor I realize there’s no way out…well, other than running up the wall, so that’s precisely what I did.  Navigating this bizarre space, but too slowly, the entire team is ejected back into the vault room once again, having failed The Drop into Bowman’s fractured mind.  We’d need to try again.  

The Drop represents the team’s hack into the mind of the target that is operating as a router, switch, firewall, and other network appliances for these megacorps that control Midway City.  Since the human mind can be filled with as much sunshine and flowers as it can horror and darkness, the team can literally make these “Drop” moments anything they can conjure. Maybe the mission is quiet and stealthy and you drop into a World War II setting that’s pure mayhem. Perhaps the mission is scorched Earth from the word go, but The Drop puts you into a level from GTFO that’s almost pure stealth?  There is literally nothing off limits here as the human mind is equally as limitless. They don’t plan on adding some weird 8-bit craziness, but there’s nothing stopping them if they change their mind.

Falling on our ass after a failed Drop, the team dusts themselves off and goes back to moving bags to the extraction point.  With the armored louvers open and the glass detonated, we now have a clear path out.  Repelling enemies, we eventually get two more bites at The Drop, successfully navigating the mental maze and cracking poor Bowman’s mind like an egg as stronger and more armored foes pour into the vault.  With all 35 bags recovered, we scramble to our extraction point and escape – 28 minutes and 27 seconds on the clock.

There is a moment where we all look at each other and laugh in surprise.  Apparently, this has never been done before – the previous internal record was 34 bags, and we just pulled off a perfect heist – 35 out of 35 with everyone still breathing.  One thing is certain, the game is still in alpha and it already nailed that “holy shit, we pulled it off!” feeling that sends goosebumps up your arms.  

The big question that we all left with was “When can we play some more?!” and that’s the hardest part – we don’t have an answer quite yet beyond “soon”.  The team is looking at likely between a year and two in Early Access, but if this is what they have up their sleeves already, it’s gonna be a wild ride.  I’m calling it now – Den of Wolves is going to blow your mind.

Den of Wolves is coming to Steam Early Access at some point in the near future, with console versions hitting when the PC version hits 1.0. Stay tuned for more on Den of Wolves right here at GamingTrend.com.