From Singapore: The global gaming market has no shortage of co-op shooters chasing the coattails of established hits. What it has in short supply is the kind of instinctive, confident game feel that keeps players queuing up for one more run. That quality, harder to manufacture than any marketing budget, is precisely what a seven-person indie studio called Evil Raptor appears to have bottled in Far Far West, one of the most-talked-about demos to emerge from Steam Next Fest's February 2026 edition.
The demo, available free on Steam as part of the Next Fest showcase running from 23 February to 2 March, drops players into a large western-themed map where squads of up to four complete side objectives, open-world tasks, and a climactic boss fight before extracting via a hover train. Between runs, players return to a Wild West hub town complete with shops, upgrade vendors, and a shooting range. The loop is familiar to anyone who has spent time with Helldivers 2 or Deep Rock Galactic, but the execution, according to Kotaku, is confident enough to stand alongside those benchmarks. The demo carries an Overwhelmingly Positive rating with more than 1,900 Steam reviews at time of writing, as reported by PC Gamer.
The premise sounds like a pitch generated by algorithm: robot cowboys who are also wizards, fighting skeleton armies in a sci-fi frontier. Yet the blend holds together because the fundamentals are sound. Gunplay is snappy and weighty. Movement comes with air dashes and high jumps that reward positioning. A combinable spell system, where acid puddles can be detonated by a teammate's fireball, adds a co-operative layer that elevates the combat beyond simple target practice. Kotaku notes that even on lower difficulty settings the game is more forgiving than its closest comparisons, though cranking the challenge up changes the calculus quickly.
Evil Raptor is the studio behind Pumpkin Jack and Akimbot, both single-player action platformers with very different ambitions from this project. The leap to co-op, first-person, mission-based design is substantial, and the fact that it comes from a team of just seven people, publishing through Fireshine Games, makes the demo's reception all the more striking. The studio previously reached the 25th highest concurrent user count ever recorded for a playtest on SteamDB, a figure that suggests the community around the game was already primed before Next Fest amplified its visibility.
There are legitimate questions about what comes after the excitement of a well-received demo. The co-op genre is crowded, and the games that endure, Deep Rock Galactic being the clearest example, do so through sustained post-launch content, careful balance patches, and a progression loop that rewards hundreds of hours of play. Far Far West's demo proves the combat works and that the core loop is engaging. What it cannot prove, by definition, is whether the full early access release will arrive with enough mission variety, boss diversity, and endgame structure to hold a playerbase once the Next Fest novelty fades. These are fair concerns for any co-op title entering a market that has seen several promising early access launches plateau within months.
A progressive perspective worth taking seriously here is that small-studio early access carries genuine risk for consumers. Players who purchase at launch are, in effect, funding ongoing development with no guaranteed timeline. Evil Raptor has not yet confirmed a specific release window beyond "later in 2026", which leaves the question of content depth at launch unanswered. Transparency around roadmaps, patch cadence, and pricing will matter enormously to how the community receives the full product.
What is clear is that Far Far West has achieved something genuinely difficult in a Next Fest that, by one count from Kotaku, featured more than 3,500 demos and drew criticism for the volume of AI-generated content clogging the showcase. Cutting through that noise on the strength of actual play feel, rather than marketing spend, is the kind of outcome the independent development sector needs more of. For Australian gamers, the game's reported Steam Deck compatibility is a practical bonus, given the device's growing local install base.
The pragmatic read on Far Far West is this: the demo earns the attention it has received, and the fundamentals are strong enough that cautious optimism is warranted. Whether Evil Raptor can sustain that over a full early access cycle is the only question that will ultimately matter. Players who try the demo and enjoy it would be well served to wishlist the game, watch for the roadmap, and hold their purchase decision until more content detail is available. That is not scepticism for its own sake; it is the reasonable approach to any early access title, however promising its first impression.