After 26 years of waiting, the Fatal Fury franchise is back with Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves! It’s hard-hitting, visually stunning, and above all, brimming with ambition. You’re here today to see if this title stands out amongst the current modern fighting games, right? Well, get some food, sit back, relax, and join me as I talk about the pros and cons of SNK’s latest fighting game release. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Final Weapon’s Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves review!
A Story You Can Sink Hours Into
Recently, fighting game developers have been putting effort into making story modes for their games. While traditional arcade modes can also tell a story, a full-on story mode could tell it even better. But if I’m being honest, some people don’t really think highly of fighting game story modes. I guess it’s because, at the end of the day, fighting games are a competitive genre like shooting games or MOBAs. A lot of people mostly turn them on just to grind the online multiplayer modes or play against friends.
Of course, this is completely fair, as everyone should enjoy a game however way they want to enjoy it. However, fighting games, just like any other video game, are an entire Thanksgiving meal. Eating only the turkey and not everything else would make you miss out on something that might satisfy your taste buds. So, let’s talk about City of the Wolves‘ story mode!
South Town
The story mode of this game is called “Episodes of South Town”. In this mode, you can experience the world of South Town from the perspective of most of the game’s cast. As you progress through the story, you’ll talk to characters, fight NPCs, and level up. Playing through main story quests will open up new areas on the map, but you can also fight NPCs in side quests to level up your character for future fights. I do want to mention that some of the NPCs have really cool designs, especially the ninja lady. And I like the approach of having the story mode just be map-based. I wish it were full-on free-roam like Street Fighter 6‘s World Tour mode, but this is fine! It kinda gives me a Sonic Battle vibe if you ever played that game on the Game Boy Advance.
Anyways, if you’re really interested in strengthening your character in this story, you can get some stat boosts called Skill Effects. These effects give your characters extra stat boosts that use your skill costs. You only have 3 skill costs at the start of the game, but these limits increase as you level up. I’d just like to remind you that each character, except for Ronaldo, has their own story, so you could spend hours just trying to complete everyone’s.
Extra Content
This isn’t all, though, as the story mode offers a bit more content! In the “Episodes of South Town” menu, you can change which character you want to be shown on the screen. It’s pretty cool to see how different characters show themselves on the menu. Additionally, the showcase menu shows rewards you gain from story battles, conversations between characters, concept art, and characters’ reactions to specific landmarks on the story map. Lastly, you have mini-games you can play, such as the Bottle Breaking mini-game hosted by Marco, which allows you to win prizes like avatars and titles if you win a lot. I absolutely love that the developers put a lot of effort into the story mode experience. But don’t worry, there’s much more to appreciate in the other offline modes.
Multiple Offline Modes
Getting it out of the way, City of the Wolves has your standard fighting game offline modes. You have arcade, tutorial, training, survival, combo trials, and time attack. Additionally, you also have a special versus mode where you can customize the way you want to play against friends or the CPU. You can increase the damage, turn off specific mechanics, and much more. The arcade mode is also very much worth your time, as some characters have emotional and beautiful endings. The cutscenes also resemble comic book panels, which is a lovely touch. As for the training mode, it’s pretty solid! You can record and replay the dummy to do things, change characters, get tips from the game, and more. You’ve got enough options here to train up your skills, so make sure you use it!
Moreover, older Fatal Fury fans should be excited to learn that two-lane battles are back! In two-lane battles, the stage is split into separate lanes, and characters can move between these lanes while fighting. There are also lane-switching combos that you can practice, which makes for a fun time. Currently, this feature is only available for one stage, and the developers confirmed that more lane battle stages are arriving. So stay tuned for more updates on this.
Customizing Your Experience
Lastly, I want to talk about the other features that I’m sure players will love digging into: color editing mode, gallery, and the jukebox. The color edit mode allows you to change the colors of characters’ clothes, hair, lips, and eyes. Multiple color values can be selected within the mode, so you have insane freedom to design the characters in the way you want. I’m not sure if SNK will put out DLC costumes in the future, but this feature will suffice. Next, you have the gallery, which is where you can see arcade mode cutscenes, artwork, and unique character voices.
And last, but most certainly not least, you have the jukebox mode. In this mode, you can listen to many classic Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting songs and make them into a playlist. The most exciting part about it is that you can even customize the City of the Wolves soundtrack to put older songs into certain sections. For example, you can replace COTW‘s character select theme with Garou’s select theme. Overall, there is a lot you can do with the offline content for COTW! But I know why some of you are here, so let’s talk about the gameplay.
A Gameplay System Inspired By Other Fighting Games
I never really grew up playing Garou: Mark of the Wolves or the Fatal Fury games, but I’ve spent years playing and competing in titles like The King of Fighters, Street Fighter, Tekken, and plenty of others. So when I say City of the Wolves has something for every kind of fighting game player, I mean it! At its core, it’s a grounded 2D fighter that rewards fundamentals like anti-airs, whiff punishes, walking your opponent to the corner, and clean hit-confirms. If you enjoy games like Street Fighter or Granblue Fantasy Versus, you’ll feel right at home. What makes City of the Wolves especially interesting, though, is how it blends mechanics from different fighting games.
For starters, by quickly pressing jump or pressing the REV button and jumping simultaneously, you will get a hop instead of a normal jump. This is taken from some of the older Fatal Fury and King of Fighters games, and it’s used to bait out the opponent’s anti-airs and do hop pressure up close. Additionally, by holding the REV button, you will activate a unique guard that pushes the opponent back every time they hit it and negates any chip damage applied to you. This is very similar to Guilty Gear‘s Faultless Defense and acts like Granblue Fantasy Versus‘s block button because it automatically blocks cross-up attacks. Also, by pressing heavy punch and kick simultaneously, you will activate an attack that can armor through multiple attacks, similar to Street Fighter 6‘s Drive Impact.
The REV System
For those unaware, REV Blow and REV Guard are tied to your REV Meter, which fills up as you use them. Additionally, REV Arts are your EX special moves that also use the REV Meter. Using these mechanics too much will eventually lead to an overheat state where you lose access to them temporarily, similar to SF6‘s burnout system. Upon reaching this overheated state, your guard gauge will start to deplete when you block attacks. It’s important to be careful with your REV usage so that you’re not put into this disadvantageous situation.
Defense
For defense-minded players, mechanics like Just Defense and Hyper Defense let you guard cancel into super or specials. This gives players the ability to punish pressure that would otherwise be safe. Just keep in mind that the attacker might have tools to bait or counter those punishes. Overall, it feels like everything has an answer in COTW, making it an exciting title to dig into for players who like to lab in training mode.
The Problem with Smart-Style
Ever since Street Fighter 6 introduced Modern Controls, more fighting games have started jumping on the trend. I’ve got a lot of thoughts about that, which I’ll get into, but first, let’s talk about how City of the Wolves handles it with its own take called “Smart Style”. Smart Style simplifies inputs by assigning one button each to Punch, Kick, Dodge Attack, and REV Blow. You can mash Punch or the Smart Combo button to get auto-combos, and there’s also a dedicated special move button. You’ll get one of your character’s specials by pressing left, down, or right, plus the special move button; no motion inputs are needed. While it’s all very beginner-friendly on the surface, there is a catch.
You see, Smart Style comes with some serious limitations. You lose access to key mechanics like Feints, Brakes, proximity kick normals, standing far light punches, proximity heavy punches, and your heavy special moves. On top of that, if you’ve got two bars of super meter, Smart Style will automatically burn both bars for the stronger super. This is horrible because rather than giving you the option of using 1 bar to save some meter, “Smart Style” just has you dump it all out.
My Honest Opinion
Here’s my honest take: I don’t understand why developers keep pushing these simplified control schemes when they’re clearly less effective than the standard Arcade Style. If you’re going to make a control option that is gimped, you might as well not include it at all. The Granblue Fantasy Versus series did it right by blending traditional and simplified inputs into one unified system, with trade-offs that still feel fair. It’s wild to me that more games aren’t following Granblue‘s lead, because that’s the standard that should be getting more attention. Nothing against the developers at all, of course, but this whole “Modern Controls” trend definitely deserves more conversation.
A Decent Online Experience That Needs Some Fixing
In City of the Wolves, online play against friends and strangers is available just like in every other modern fighting game. You have your traditional ranked matches, casual matches, and lobby matches modes to engage in worldwide combat. In particular, you can chill out in the training mode while you wait for a ranked or casual match. This is all fine and dandy, but my only gripe is the mouse cursor in the online lobbies. It’s way too slow, and you can’t even use the mouse to control it on PC, which is weird considering that the story mode has a cursor sensitivity option within it. Hopefully, the developers at SNK will consider updating this in the future.
But hey! Rollback netcode is present in City of the Wolves, so you don’t have to worry about a delay-based experience. It also has cross-play, so PC, Xbox, and PlayStation players can play amongst each other. Overall, the connections I played were pretty fine for the most part. I should mention, though, that some of the players I played against online mentioned that there was one-sided rollback. This refers to a rollback netcode issue where only one player experiences the rollback, while the other player sees everything running smoothly. Normally, if the connection isn’t great, both players might see some rollback, like characters jittering or quickly snapping positions. But in one-sided rollback, only one player sees those glitches, while the other sees a clean match. Having an option where players can adjust their rollback and set their own delay would help alleviate this.
You can also watch replays in City of the Wolves as well. While watching your own or others’ replays, you can speed up the footage, slow it down, skip forward, skip backward, and display inputs. However, I should mention that many replays in the game are desyncing. This basically means that you’ll see both characters standing still or doing weird actions, which usually means that a desync has occurred. I’m hoping that the developers can fix this quickly after launch so that players can watch replays with no issues.
Cloning Feature
Lastly, there is an interesting feature in this game called Cloning. In City of the Wolves, the online mode has AI technology that studies your play style while you fight online. This will end up creating a clone of yourself, giving you the ability to pit it against other players’ clones or even fight against yours. You can also create a clone that learns the play style of particular players, a combination of other players, or an entire rank. So if you ever want to strategize against other players, this is an excellent feature to play around with.
A True Comeback for SNK
Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves genuinely feels like the true comeback for SNK. While games like Samurai Shodown 2019 and The King of Fighters XV were great, they didn’t really hit the mark fully due to lacking features or appeal. With City of the Wolves, it really feels like this game is an improvement upon their previous titles.
With fantastic offline modes and gameplay mechanics that can appeal to multiple fighting game players, it’s got enough to keep people interested. While the online is most certainly a giant step above KOFXV and SamSho, it still needs work.
But that’s all for this Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves review! Thank you all for reading, and stay tuned for any City of the Wolves news here at Final Weapon.
Disclaimer: SNK provided Final Weapon with a PlayStation 5 & PC (Steam) copy of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves for review purposes.
