Den of Wolves Preview - Welcome to the Machine

It’s been a little over a year since we last checked in with 10 Chambers, creators of GTFO. While we’ve been away, they’ve been hard at work on their next project – Den of Wolves, an all-new co-op shooter that calls back to the studio’s heist game roots when their founders worked on projects like the original Payday.

While Den of Wolves was announced towards the end of 2023, we’re only now just getting to see how it’s shaped up in the time since then. 10 Chambers has called it the game they “must make”, and all of this is coming together through gameplay, its themes, and design philosophies.

Den of Wolves is set in a dystopian near-future place called Midway City – one controlled by corporations, and where the player will work as a criminal for hire as they engage in industrial espionage, sabotage, and assassinations to help rival companies.

Much of Den of Wolves centers on traditional first-person gunplay, but there’s also an all-new mechanic called “Dive”, which lets players hack into human neural networks with unique gameplay elements.

With a focus on strategic planning in play, Den of Wolves blends stealth and action in a way we haven’t quite seen before.

We were able to preview some select missions from Den of Wolves, which still doesn’t have a release date, but will be available on Early Access when it launches in the future. That said, the preview was largely focused on two missions that helped draw up a picture of what players can look forward to in the full release.

For the first part, four of us gathered up together, meeting in a traditional load-out screen where you select weapons and what kind of tools you want to use for the mission. There’s a selection of guns, knives, and other supplies like shields – the latter especially will come in handy later.

So with weapons in hand, the first smaller mission we attempted involved getting some supplies, and a drone that will be important at some point in the future.

A lot of the level design here feels like GTFO – you’ll go in, take out stationed enemies with stealth or force, and then meet up at scanning points to continue. There are also vaults that can be opened using drill tools, and it’s important to keep an eye on these because they do need to be repaired once in a while as they go.

The co-op nature of these missions comes into focus here too because you’ll want to coordinate what everyone is doing – especially when there’s some enemies that can detect you with proximity, or when you’re in the middle of scanning and there’s a rush of enemies, you’ll need to take them out efficiently.

Once we’d obtained the drone, it was on to the next, bigger mission we’d get to see in Den of Wolves. For this we actually took a step back in the real world and planned out this mission on a scale map to work out how each of us was going to work during the heist.

Our first idea was to split up. The mission would have us find a set of three keys randomly inside three different vaults. Then we’d meet up and blast some windows out for an eventual escape, whilst also fighting off enemies and then getting to the whole Dive portion of the game.

We gave it a go, and after getting into the vault building through some nefarious means, we executed the plan. Two of us took the upstairs floor, and two of us went to the floor below. While we were starting to collect our keys, however, we came under fire, and the team ended up regrouping but ultimately dying and failing the mission because we weren’t equipped well enough.

But Den of Wolves encourages trying again, so that we did, and this time we decided to go around to each vault as the whole lot of us, break down those vaults and get the keys quickly. We also grabbed enough shields in the load-out screen to get us through some tough firefights.

Den of Wolves’ unique mechanic, the Dive system, came into play during the part of the mission where we had to hold our ground. This neural link counts down three separate times, and all four of us are seemingly transported into a virtual world where the goal is to get to the end.

It’s not as easy as going from point A to point B, however. The gravity is abnormal, and perspective can change after a single jump. There’s platforming too, and it can get tricky to time with all of that considered.

There is a bit of leniency, though, as only one person needs to scan in at the end of the map. There is a countdown, so you can’t stay in there forever.

It’s all fairly hectic and again, it’s why communicating with your team can be the difference between success and failure. We did manage to complete the mission, and it really did feel like the perfect taste of what’s to come in Den of Wolves.

For those looking for a deep co-op challenge or just want to have fun with some heist gameplay, it’s certainly one to watch, whenever it gets around to releasing.

TechRaptor was invited to an event to preview Den of Wolves by the publisher.