Nightblood W: Cutthroat Wolf Demo Preview | Fast, Fluid, and Dripping With Cyberpunk Style
A Grappling Hook, Devil May Cry Style Combos, and a Neon Soaked City Make This One to Watch
EDITIORIALS
GP
6/15/20263 min read
The biggest strength of this demo is the combat. The game focuses on quick movement, melee attacks, dodges, and a grappling hook. The grappling hook is honestly chef’s kiss. Even though I’m not very good with mouse and keyboard, it was still incredibly fun to use. It allows you to be hyper mobile and nearly fully airborne the entire time you fight while chaining attacks between enemies. This keeps the combat feeling fast paced in tight while most 2D games struggle in this department.
Hit feedback is also excellent. Whether it’s shooting your gun, grappling around, or slicing with your knife, each piece of combat sandbox feels fun to use each and every time. There is also a combo meter similar to Devil May Cry that has both a counter and a letter grade so you are encouraged to experiment and figure out how to combine everything to best of your abilities. The boss fight already showed a fair amount of complexity and had me feeling like I had a long way to go to master what at first glance feels like a fairly simple system.
Strong Cyberpunk Atmosphere
The pixel art looks great, with neon lights, a futuristic city, and a colorful cyberpunk aesthetic. The atmosphere is one of the first things that grabbed my attention. I also love how the dialogue sections feature fully drawn character models as well. I’m a big fan of when games like Persona do this. It adds a ton of depth to the world and the people you interact with.
The levels are very fun to interact with and have a surprising amount of detail for a pixel art game. You can tell a lot of care has been put into the art and it really shows. I’m very curious to see if the full game features more biome variety but even just the cyberpunk city looks phenomenal.
Accessible Controls
The developers designed the game around simpler combos and easier controls instead of complicated fighting-game inputs. That makes it approachable for players who enjoy action games but don’t want to memorize a bunch of long combo strings while also rewarding those who do want to maximize the systems. It’s one of those easy to learn, hard to master types of design ethos.
I also found and collected a few implants in the demo. I believe the full game will have even more options to choose from. These augment and change your playstyle in some interesting ways. As of right now, you can equip four in total:
• 2 active equipment slots
• 2 passive equipment slots
This encourages players to experiment with different playstyles instead of using the same setup for the entire game, and it fits the cyberpunk style really well.
The music was also great and had me jamming during some of the boss fights. To me this is a distinct highlight. Whoever worked on this music cooked hard. Each track does a ton for adding to the atmosphere while also making the combat and traversal more fun to interact with as well.
Story Doesn’t Stand Out Yet
The demo introduces Loreto and the revenge plot, but it’s still too early to judge the story. We’ll have to see how it develops when the full game releases. It is a lot of text early on and it would be nice to see this worked on or adjusted to appear more clear from the jump. The dynamic between Loreta and his robot companion is quite fun though and I look forward to seeing how that progresses.
