It truthfully shocks me that there aren’t extra heist video games, as a result of I can consider few experiences extra superior than finishing up my boyhood lawbreaking fantasies with the lads. Fortunately, after greater than a decade away from the glamor and gunpowder of felony exercise, a gaggle of acquainted faces behind Payday: The Heist and Payday 2 have taken a break from making the insanely troublesome co-op shooter GTFO to return to what they do finest. And that’s, make video games the place you and your pals work collectively to interrupt the legislation by pulling off a sequence of elaborate and high-risk burglaries for no different purpose than to fulfill your wanton greed. However the place the Payday sequence was and continues to be a reasonably normal recreation about robbing banks, the upcoming Den of Wolves provides a compelling sci-fi world with a gritty, cyberpunk aptitude, multi-phase planning and execution of break-ins the place you’ll be able to resolve precisely the way you need to pull it off, and most significantly: the power to dive into the minds of others to steal the precious secrets and techniques hidden inside their brains. If that doesn’t get your blood pumping, I don’t know what is going to!
Den of Wolves takes place in the extraordinarily darkish close to future the place the world’s know-how ecosystem imploded as a consequence of hackers, and firms got free rein to do no matter they happy to fight the disaster, together with however not restricted to human experimentation, and constructing harmful and unpredictable applied sciences (y’know, your fundamental cyberpunk hellscape stuff) as long as they stored their actions contained to the newly minted libertarian dystopia and Andrew Ryan’s moist dream: Halfway Metropolis. Naturally this results in firms storing their information straight inside completely unhackable human brains, reworking the host to all that scrumptious information into an exquisite little flesh battery, from the seems of it. However we’re hardened criminals, guys. Are we actually gonna let a brilliant creepy meat laptop locked away in a financial institution vault get in the best way of us pulling off heists? I feel not!
To that finish, Den of Wolves has you and three mates planning and finishing up a sequence of felonies in Halfway Metropolis, the place you’ll overcome these pesky brain-based safety techniques by mind-melding with victims to tear off their secrets and techniques and make off with the loot. My demo targeted on a single operation the place my crew and I deliberate and executed a high-stakes assault on a financial institution presently below new administration by a really aggressive road gang with energy and tech sufficient to rival world governments – fairly nasty stuff. On this explicit case, our plan of assault was to make use of a swarm of drones acquired from a earlier theft to ambush various these gang members to achieve entrance into the bolstered stronghold, then go loud as doable, taking pictures up the place with reckless abandon till we discovered what we had been searching for. On this occasion, the massive prize was the information inside somebody’s head who was locked safely away inside a vault and scarcely resembled a human anymore; really simply straight nightmare gasoline, if I’m being trustworthy.
A lot of this caper went off in a means any Payday fan will instantly acknowledge: we used a wide range of automated weapons to smash and seize every little thing in sight whereas holding off waves of parents who had been fairly mad about being ripped off, deploying and repairing drills that break each couple seconds even in a sci-fi future, apparently. Naturally, cooperation was important to our success, as we laid down cowl fireplace for each other, revived downed teammates who received caught in a foul spot, and known as out to 1 one other as we heaved baggage stuffed with loot throughout the ruined fortress. There actually wasn’t an entire lot new concerning the basis of this heist recreation, except for possibly the consumable gear talents that allow my squad do issues like throw down a brief barrier that offered some restricted cowl in the center of a battle.
However all that modified when the financial institution vault doorways slid open, revealing the prize we had been chasing after: a caterpillar-like human lump locked away to comprise invaluable secrets and techniques. After somewhat little bit of hacking, we lept from the bodily aircraft and into the thoughts of this particular person to hack open their mind and make off with their secrets and techniques. Now, I don’t know what precisely is happening in the thoughts of this clearly and understandably disturbed particular person, however what we discovered ready for us inside his dome was an unsettling and surreal sequence of landscapes that we needed to leap between to achieve entry to their ideas. And since we had been on a timer, we couldn’t afford to take our time or slip up, lest we get booted again out to the actual world and must proceed to carry out towards enemies earlier than getting one other crack at it.
This was the one mind I dove into in my restricted time with Den of Wolves, however I used to be instructed that each thoughts would current distinctive challenges to play towards, not simply the high-stakes platforming of our present mission. And whereas it stays to be seen simply how attention-grabbing or how a lot selection these may have, this part fully shook up an in any other case acquainted components in a critically cool means. I really like taking pictures at rival felony gangs and robo cops as a lot as the subsequent convicted felon, but it surely was actually neat to leap forwards and backwards between reality-based FPS fight and fully weird cooperative platforming in a geometrically unimaginable world of creativeness. That actually helps to set this one other than what I nervous would possibly simply be a Payday sequel with a cyberpunk pores and skin plastered over it. As a substitute, it appears Den of Wolves plans on taking some actual dangers and attempting stuff that makes it bizarre and attention-grabbing, and I’m completely down for that.
In between journeys into our poor, troubled sufferer’s thoughts, we had been yanked proper again out to the place we left off, solely milliseconds apparently having elapsed in meat house whereas we went parading round in somebody’s noggin. After leaping again into his cranium for a number of extra servings of deeply uncomfortable leaping puzzles, we received what we got here for and made our exit by blowing up some home windows with excessive explosives and diving out to what I can solely hope was some Murderer’s Creed-style hay piles ready conveniently positioned slightly below.
Although Den of Wolves borrows fairly a bit from Payday and different crime video games, the setting, elaborate planning mechanics, and particularly its surreal mind-hacking mechanics all made me really feel fairly assured that developer 10 chambers’ return to the great world of heisting has a very good likelihood of being one other beautiful success. Right here’s hoping they will pull off the rating of a lifetime when this factor finally makes its means into early entry on PC.