Hellboy Web of Wyrd - The First Preview | gamescom 2023

ign.com:

If ever there was a comic book element that was destined to become the signature weapon of a video game, it’s Hellboy’s Right Hand of Doom. I mean just look at it – a massive stone fist made purely for beating the seven bells out of massive monsters. And that’s exactly what you do in Hellboy Web of Wyrd (pronounced ‘wurd’, not ‘weird’), a roguelite brawler that looks like the contents of a Mike Mignola comic emptied onto your screen.

Developer Upstream Arcade has built the crimson cambion in the only logical way; he’s basically a walking tank. Regular enemies stand absolutely no chance against Hellboy, and a single strike from his doom fist wipes them from existence. The real challenge is in the big bads who accompany them. I recently went toe-to-toe with these towering monsters during an hour of hands-on time with Web of Wyrd and found myself pleasantly surprised by how crunchy its punch-ups are.

Where many roguelites are built around fast and twitchy combat, Web of Wyrd is closer in pace to the likes of Monster Hunter and Dark Souls. Enemy attacks have long wind-up animations, each one offering a clear warning of where the blow will land. And you definitely won’t miss those tells; thanks to the sheer size of enemies and that bold Mike Mignola art style, you’ll quickly learn to side-step an overhead cleave and duck an incoming right hook.

But as with all melee fighting games, it's the way the simple fundamentals chain together that makes the combat satisfying. Hellboy’s paranormal detective gear is rounded out with a gun and magical charm – for my demo run I had his classic revolver and a talisman that repelled enemies. And so between weaving through enemy sword strikes and throwing punches of my own, I was able to push