The last entry in the Fatal Fury franchise came out in 1999, so Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves is certainly a long-awaited return. For those who love the technical and one-of-a-kind mechanics of earlier Fatal Fury games, City of the Wolves will feel like a glorious and well-deserved modernization, while newcomers may find a unique combat sandbox that stands apart from other mainstream fighting franchises, even if it is a bit lean in the content department.
Indeed, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves isn't Tekken 8 or Street Fighter 6; it lacks well-wrought alternate game modes, full-motion cutscenes, and fancy visuals. It's a fighting game for fighting game fans first and foremost, with mechanics that reward quick thinking and mastery in a similar manner as the best arcade classics. There's a noticeable emphasis on learning techniques that aren't character-specific, making it easy to feel like a seasoned pro as you explore its roster. With endlessly satisfying mechanics like Just Defense, REV Blows, and counters, City of the Wolves manages to offer rewarding gameplay to those who take the time to learn its ABCs.
There's a good chance that City of the Wolves' multiplayer will have a long and rich life courtesy of this deceptively deep combat, but its single-player options can feel outdated and bland. With little in the way of an engaging narrative or meaty alternate game modes, more casual audiences might walk away from City of the Wolves feeling underwhelmed, especially if they compare it to other AAA fighting franchises like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter. How much you enjoy City of the Wolves will be relative to how much you temper your expectations from the outset. If you know what you're getting into, City of the Wolves could very well be the best fighting game you'll play all year.
Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves Is Quick, Snappy, and Endlessly Entertaining
City of the Wolves' Packs a Punch Where It Counts
Making a contemporary fighting game isn't easy. Developers often feel pressure to cater to two distinct audiences: the hardcore, competitive scene, and casual players looking to pick up and play a game with their friends. Looking at City of the Wolves through this lens, it's safe to say that SNK has succeeded, straddling the fine line between technical action and straightforward, unpretentious fun.
Studying the move lists for any given Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves character is a clean and quick experience; there aren't massive, complex mountains of essay-length combos to memorize. This might make the game seem a bit dumbed-down, especially for those coming from the likes of Tekken, where it can take months to fully grasp the breadth of each character's unique combat capabilities. There's some merit to this interpretation, but City of the Wolves still manages to feel deep despite its lack of over-the-top and impressive combination attacks. There's virtue in the game's brevity, as mastering a new character is more about applying the game's broader combat mechanics to different archetypes, like a heavyweight, slow character versus an acrobatic one.
This can make City of the Wolves feel more like a single-player action game than a traditional fighting game at times. If one were to compare City of the Wolves to, say, Dark Souls, a character like Tizoc would be a slow, hard-hitting greatsword, while someone like Hokutomaru is a rapier or spear: the button inputs are mostly the same for both, but the differences in range, DPS, and speed recontextualize how the core mechanics feel to engage with.
It's these core mechanics that form the brunt of City of the Wolves' gameplay; mastering skills like REV Guard, which allows you to maintain distance while guarding, is far more important than nailing any character-specific combos. This lends the game a certain elegance, as you can swap between different characters with relative ease. Learning the ins and outs of how such skills function is what will determine your viability in a given fight, which makes experimenting with different characters rewarding rather than intimidating.
It helps that these mechanics are incredibly satisfying to pull off. Combining perfect blocks, counters, backsteps, Throw Techs, and REV Blows on the fly will make you feel like a pro after just a few hours, and the game's finely tuned hitboxes make frame-perfect dodges and last-second attacks evoke a sense of low-grade euphoria. New features like the REV Gauge and S.P.G. Can turn the tide of battle at any time, making fights surprisingly unpredictable without sacrificing strategy or fairness.
It's a rather accessible combat framework as well, especially due to the aforementioned streamlining of character-specific combos and special moves. Flashy and fluid attacks aren't necessarily easy to pull off, but they are simple, which should make City of the Wolves relatively welcoming for series' newcomers. The new Smart Style feature plays an important role in this accessibility, though its execution is questionable. Smart Style is similar to Special Style in Tekken 8, offering an alternate, simplified control scheme that lets players unleash high-level moves with fewer button presses. But since City of the Wolves already has fairly simple button inputs, activating Smart Style can sometimes feel like a gross oversimplification of the already-simple gameplay. It can sometimes feel like the game is playing itself when this feature is active.
Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves' Single-Player Offerings Are Respectable, but Undercooked
City of the Wolves doesn't have a traditional single-player campaign. Rather, it offers a standard arcade mode, where players progress through a gauntlet of eight opponents, and the much more inventive and unique Episodes of South Town mode. Episodes of South Town set players loose on the titular metropolis at the center of the Fatal Fury series, letting them engage in a nonlinear series of battles as a single character, leveling them up as they progress. As a character levels up, their basic stats will increase, but they will also unlock special skills, from simple buffs to more nuanced, modular perks, like the option to add a launch effect to a dodge attack. These skills remain unlocked for all other characters, so you can mix and match them to best suit your playstyle. These RPG-inspired skills are the clear highlight of Episodes of South Town, injecting City of the Wolves' single-player offerings with some much-needed depth and variety.
Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves doesn't have a bevy of cosmetics or alternate character outfits, but its Color Edit feature, which allows players to customize the color and patterns of almost every element of a character's costume, makes up for this.
Beyond that, though, Episodes of South Town can often feel like an elongated arcade mode with some superfluous bells and whistles. The individual EOST campaigns are mostly disconnected from one another, which is a little disappointing: it would have been interesting to see a more in-depth and ambitious narrative, especially since the game lacks a more dedicated single-player story. And while the game makes regular reference to "exploring" South Town through EOST, the mode ultimately boils down to swapping through various menus, with little in the way of true exploration. As a fighting game, City of the Wolves certainly doesn't need more fleshed-out exploration systems, but it's odd that it presents EOST as such, when it's far more stripped-back than that.
Single-player shortcomings aside, Fatal Fury: The City of the Wolves is a fantastic experience. It may lack the full-motion cutscenes, cosmetics, and flashy game modes of its contemporaries, but it more than makes up for this with its strong fundamentals. SNK has done a great job bringing this long-dormant franchise into the modern age, and one can only hope that subsequent sequels continue to hone City of the Wolves' unambiguous strengths.
- Released
- April 24, 2025
- ESRB
- T For Teen // Language, Violence, Suggestive Themes
- Developer(s)
- SNK
- Publisher(s)
- SNK
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 4
WHERE TO PLAY
- Platform(s)
- PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PC
- Genre(s)
- Fighting
- Satisfying and intuitive combat fundamentals
- A killer soundtrack
- Unique, distinct characters
- Respectable customization in the form of Color Edit
- Smart Style feels a bit too simple
- A noticeable lack of deep single-player gameplay
- Episodes of South Town is underwhelming
Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves will release on PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Series X|S on April 24, 2025. The Best War Games was provided a PS5 download code for the purpose of this review.