There's a reason why I said Souls style and not Dark Souls specifically. Norse GoW still has Dark Souls as a heavy inspiration, because the default controls for light and heavy attack are R1 and R2 respectively. The Classic controls have the Greek GoW as the alternative for both games.
The fist can be useful, even in late game for at least GoW4. There were even items you could equip to make your fist stun enemies faster or just by upgrading your weapons and etc. I do know the fist are much less useful in Ragnarok compared to 4.