Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves Is A Deep, Rewarding Fighting Game With Very Fixable Problems
As this ongoing fighting game renaissance continues, another long-running series is finally making its return: Fatal Fury. After two and a half decades of being relegated to cameo appearances, which have resulted in oldhead-obliterating sentences like “Hey, it’s Terry from Super Smash Bros,” Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves will see these characters returning to their home turf. As a direct sequel to Garou: Mark of the Wolves, which is considered by many to be one of the greatest fighting games ever made, this follow-up has a lot on its plate, tasked with maintaining the identity of what came before while modernizing things so that players aren’t giving themselves arthritis with pretzel motions.
Having played a somewhat unhealthy amount of City of Wolves’ open beta this past weekend, I can confirm that this latest installment lives up to that legacy, reutilizing many of Garou’s core mechanics while introducing its own clever additions. The result is a fast-paced fighting game that makes contemporary affordances, like bigger input buffers, but maintains much of the complexity and nuance sanded down in many of its modern contemporaries. Its battles are dynamic, allow for player expression, and have a great deal of depth, but are friendly enough that I could get a solid grasp on its systems in a a few days despite being a series neophyte. Together, it passes the most important test for betas, previews, and demos: I want to play more of it as soon as possible. Unfortunately, though, all these gameplay boons come with a bunch of unsexy problems that have plagued this genre for quite some time, like matchmaking gaffes and basic UI annoyances that are even more difficult to stomach in a post-Street Fighter 6 world. Basically, it has the engine of a sports car and the chassis of a beat-up sedan.
Let’s start with the good, though, like how it seems to be a sharp, well-considered fighting game. To give a brief overview of its systems, this is a five-button fighter, with four buttons corresponding to punches and kicks of various strengths and a fifth button used in combination with others for a few different advanced techniques. There are three types of jumps: regular ones, dash jumps that cover more distance, and short hops that stay close to the ground. As for its overall feel, it’s sort of like an overly caffeinated version of Street Fighter, not quite as bonkers as Guilty Gear, but much more jump-happy than most “traditional” fighters because there are so many different ways to approach your opponent.
On top of this, there is a long list of specific mechanics that have made their way over from Garou, such as Just Defense, which is when you block right as an opponent is attacking to get certain benefits, or Guard Cancel, where you cancel a Just Defense into a special attack or super. Two of the most interesting moves from these older games also return with Breaks and Feints: Breaks let you cancel the end of certain special attacks, while Feints allow you to remove the end lag of normal attacks, both allowing for freeform pressure and combos that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
Beyond these returning elements, there’s the all-new REV system, which, to put it simply, functions very similar to Street Fighter 6’s Drive Gauge. When you perform REV abilities like powered-up versions of special attacks (i.e., throwing a faster, stronger projectile similar to EX moves in Street Fighter), this increases your REV meter, and if the meter maxes out, then you enter Overheat where you can’t use these skills again for a while. Beyond this, you can also spend REV gauge to perform a stronger guard where you negate chip damage and push foes back, or utilize Excel Cancels to chain special attacks together for better combos and pressure. And that’s not even to mention the S.P.G. system, where if your health bar is in a specific range, you can perform even more maneuvers like extra strong super attacks and REV Blows, attacks designed by Satan himself (more on this later).
If it sounds like there’s a lot going on, well, that’s because there is. Luckily, though, most of these particulars are either intuitive or optional, resulting in a flexible combat system that’s deep without being overwhelming. On offense, there are lots of different tools that let you set up tricky, fast-paced situations, while on defense, there are just as many ways to escape.
However, perhaps the most novel and freeform aspects here are Breaking and Feinting, which are so ingenious that I’m surprised they haven’t been used in more fighting games since Garou. While it can be tricky to integrate these at first, they add so much nuance to both combos and pressure by letting you end attacks early to remain safe or perform juggles that would be impossible otherwise. Add in the fact that you can spend REV Meter to cancel powered-up special moves into each other, and there’s even more room to express yourself. It was quite smart to structure the REV Meter like Street Fighter 6’s Drive System because this gives you more options most of the time while also adding a risk-reward element for going all out on offense. And while everything is fast and frenetic, there is still room to make use of the fabled fighting game “fundamentals,” like whiff punishing and shimmying, because normal attacks have sizeable hitboxes and hurtboxes.
And although City of the Wolves is fairly offense-oriented like many modern fighting games, there is a similar amount of complexity on defense, leaving room for counterplay and mastery. The Just Defense mechanic lets you turn the tables with a well-timed block by chaining this into reversal moves. It’s like a safer but slightly less potent version of Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike’s parry system, rewarding players for learning the ins and outs of movesets. Add in the Rev Guard, which lets you push back foes for the cost of a meter, and you have a strong suite of ways to react to offensive arsenals, making every stage of these fights feel deep and interactive.
Frankly, as someone who has bounced off other recent SNK games like The King of Fighters XV, I was surprised by how intensely I was taken by City of the Wolves’ hop-heavy battles. The characters in the beta were much easier to pick up and play than I expected, but each had nuances, from Hotaru’s hop kicks to B. Jenet’s floating strikes. Even Terry Bogard and Rock Howard, who have relatively similar moves on the surface, felt distinct due to differences in movement speed and abilities. It all resulted in a brilliantly designed experience that left me wanting more.
However, if there was one big flaw when it came to these otherwise well-tuned interlocking systems, it’s that REV Blow attacks do not feel correctly tuned at the moment. These are armored strikes that blow through incoming moves, in some cases even setting up juicy combo opportunities if landed at the right time. Although they cost REV meter and can only be used in S.P.G. mode, which triggers when your health bar is in a certain range, they seem too potent right now. While it’s certainly possible to counter them with a REV Blow of your own, there’s a good chance you won’t be in S.P.G. mode at the same time as your opponent, meaning this doesn’t work most of the time. There are other ways to deal with these attacks, but whenever they are in play, this complex game suddenly becomes over-simplified.
However, while REV Blows are irritating, the element that has a much bigger chance at stifling City of the Wolves’ success is that almost everything outside its core gameplay is a bit of a mess right now. For starters, just like with SNK’s The King of Fighter XV, this beta had problems with online matchmaking, with some players saying it took them over five minutes to find a match despite thousands of players being online at once. I never had to wait quite this long, but it still took longer than expected given the player count. And to make matters worse, it would frequently pit me against players with poor connections, which felt unavoidable because there was no indicator of whether an opponent was on ethernet or Wi-Fi. Although the game’s rollback netcode would sometimes deliver smooth matches against opponents with bad connections, it was a toss-up. Weirdly enough, I had many matches against opponents with a “fast” connection speed that played out like jittery rollback fests, likely caused by my opponents using Wi-Fi, which does not seem to play nicely with this netcode.
Beyond the time spent waiting for matches, everything outside of gameplay was also way too slow: the menus have a strange amount of latency, a blank black screen appears for several seconds between rounds without a loading indicator for some reason, and it takes too long to get back in for a rematch. There are just a ton of small oversights here, like the cumbersome Room Match menus or the fact that your rank is account-wide instead of being for specific characters you play. These gaffes may sound minor, but over hundreds of matches, they add up. And while fighting game fans used to grit their way through these kinds of situations, it feels more egregious in a world where you can just go play Street Fighter 6 and be free from these problems.
Thankfully, this was just a beta, and there’s still time to address many of these issues; SNK already announced they’re considering a second beta to address the matchmaking errors. But the thing is, fighting game fans have been burned so many times by these kinds of circumstances that it’s a little hard to believe everything will be remedied in the next two months before release. In particular, The King of Fighters XV was plagued with severe matchmaking issues in some regions for more than a year before it was patched. SNK’s recent fighting games have consistently suffered from these kinds of shortcomings, which is perhaps one of the reasons their output hasn’t taken off like the other big contemporary series like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Tekken.
In short, it really comes down to this: City of the Wolves’ core gameplay is so good that if they can get everything else together, it has the potential to be one of the most satisfying genre entries in a very long time. Many of its design decisions feel like a measured response to the contemporary “simplification” of the genre while still balancing new and old, adding smart modern affordances and influences while maintaining a high-skill-ceiling that will reward diehards. But while its battles are a blast from the past in all the right ways, hopefully, SNK will fix the multiplayer problems and other annoyances that are just way too old school.
Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.