After playing a Den of Wolves heist, I have high hopes for the cyberpunk take on Payday 2

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 "," as CEO and co-founder Ulf Andersson declared in an .

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. It's somewhat similar to the structure of GTA Online's heists, where you'll do a few smaller things to line everything up before sinking a lot more time into the main event.

In play, this side mission feels like a starter. The four of us tackle a couple of rooms full of guards and I mess up the stealth sections magnificently, but it takes around 10 minutes and doesn't feel too challenging.

Making our way through that prep mission without needing to be fully switched on was a breath of fresh air, because when the bullets really start flying, Den of Wolves feels like the spiritual successor to Payday it's been billing itself as. Enemies pour out of every doorway as you hoof bags of loot around and adapt to the ever changing objectives while keeping a close eye on your remaining ammo.

In the two missions that I played, these objectives involved hitting buttons, cracking open vaults or standing on little circles on the ground.

At face value this sounds simplistic, but dealing with the attacking enemies and communicating with your team will take up the majority of your brain space. Sure, you're just pushing a button—but it's in a control room and you'll need to fight through a few hundred enemies to get there, with finite health and ammo.

Shoot 'em a lot

The guns feel underwhelming at the moment. I'd have liked more zoom on the marksman rifle, and single bullets don't have much impact, so instead I often resorted to hosing my enemies down with the assault rifle or SMG as I moved towards them.

There are a few different types of gear, but during my hands-on I mostly used the transparent portable shield, which you can deploy onto a hard surface and pick up for reuse easily. In hectic fights I'd toss this to the ground and then weave around it, taking out enemies before crouching beside it to reload and take stock of the situation from a safe position.

Combat feels scrappy and you'll often want to have a few people shooting at a time to guarantee results, which fits with 10 Chambers' tight focus on cooperative combat, but felt unsatisfying for me. At this early stage it's hard to say whether this is is something that balancing can fix or whether it's just a case of user error at my end, but I found myself often wishing I could do something that felt more damaging to my opponents.

Still, it's clear that Den of Wolves is going [[link]] to deliver on its promise of being a tough co-op shooter that needs you to lose your ego and work as a tightknit group to succeed. The shooting feels like it's nearly there, and that's going to be key because this is a much more combat focused game than GTFO.

Or maybe that's just me, because any time I tried to do anything even resembling stealth, I crashed out, mistiming my stealth kills and plunging my squad into a fight to the death again and again. I don't even feel bad.

Mind games

Where Den of Wolves feels like it will elevate things is with the world it is offering up. The mission I played was a spectacle, with voiced characters, a couple big set pieces, and little touches, like news reports about the wider city playing on screens.

A lot of the mood is provided by the incredible soundtrack, a Simon Viklund special that manages to amp me up in the fights and keep me on edge when things have cooled off. Viklund is best known for his work on the Payday games and GTFO, but I think he's doing some of his best work so far here.

And the shady Midway City feels like a fun environment to run some heists in, with opportunities for "industrial espionage, sabotage, and assassinations for rival corporations."

The inclusion of mind heists—called "diving" in the game—gives 10 Chambers the opportunity to do just about whatever it wants in terms of gameplay. In the mission I played, the in-brain portions were trippy platforming challenges reminiscent of something out of American McGee's Alice, but the devs plan to include other kinds of dreamlike dives that contrast with [[link]] the more grounded wave defense out in Midway's various corporate strongholds.

If the shooting gets a bit of a tune up and Den of Wolves launches into early access with a few interesting missions, it's easy to see a loyal fanbase gathering around the game like they did Payday 2. There's no release date yet for Den of Wolves, but you can follow its and for updates.