City of the Wolves’ Is a Stellar Hardcore Fighting Game

There’s no one way to properly revive a classic. For games like Street Fighter 6, its creators focused on hitting all the right notes that fans broadly know, while trying to streamline the gameplay to be as accessible as possible. For others like Tekken 8, there’s little need to change up much; sometimes more of a good thing is enough.

But when a game series is slightly more niche, perhaps only well known to a dedicated community or as a fleeting memory for casual players, how does a reintroduction go? That’s a position where SNK’s Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves finds itself. Arriving at the heels of a fighting game renaissance led by competitors Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Tekken — on top of fresh faces like Riot’s 2XKO — City of the Wolves isn’t just the latest revival fighting for its place amid the pack, it’s also an introduction for many to a franchise that’s played a pivotal role in gaming history, even if you don’t remember it.

As the first game in Fatal Fury saga in 26 years, City of the Wolves is saddled with the weight of not just living up to a storied legacy for its existing fans but teeing up something worth sinking into for newcomers. To that end, it’s a mixed bag. Despite being wonderfully designed and able to go toe-to-toe mechanically with any other fighting game out there, City of the Wolves doesn’t quite do enough to differentiate itself from its peers. If the name Fatal Fury alone doesn’t immediately instill hype, it’s unlikely that whatever SNK is showing off here — from colorful graphics to downright bizarre real-life cameo characters — will mean much.

But if you’re into fighting games and willing to take the plunge, City of the Wolves is one of the best brawlers ever made, and that’s saying something when the genre is currently as good as it’s been since the Nineties.

A classic franchise with familiar ties

So, what even is Fatal Fury? If you’re old to remember a time when arcades were a thing, or even just arcade cabinets at pizzerias, video rental stores, and the lobbies of chain restaurants, you’ve likely seen the names SNK or Neo Geo. Fatal Fury was the first big fighting game for Japanese publisher SNK, arriving in 1991 on Neo Geo arcade and home platforms. The game inspired multiple sequels and other series like Art of Fighting and The King of Fighters — all of which cross over with a shared continuity and characters, although the latter is the most famous.

At first glance, it’d be easy to mistake Fatal Fury for Street Fighter; the two games look and play very much alike and there’s a big reason for that: both series were created by the same man, Takashi Nishiyama. After directing the original Street Fighter game in 1987 and defining the tenets of the fighting game genre, Nishiyama stepped away from Capcom to produce another new game for SNK called Fatal Fury. Sharing much of their core DNA, down to their visuals and controls, Fatal Fury and its sister series all feel like spiritual successors to Street Fighter, despite the fact that they were all being created in tandem.

That similarity still stands. Throughout the years, SNK and Capcom have had multiple crossovers that all feel entirely natural. Their characters can easily slip into one franchise or the other without major gameplay changes — a feature that City of the Wolves itself is capitalizing on with post-launch additions to its roster including Street Fighter’s Ken and Chun-Li.

In the lead up to City of the Wolves, Fatal Fury leads Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui both made a splash as downloadable characters for Street Fighter 6. The synergy has been good for raising awareness of the SNK characters for anyone who’s just joining the scene.

Mark of the wolves

Like Street Fighter 6, City of the Wolves is a 2D fighting game with three-dimensional character models, which are all gorgeously designed to crank up their charm. The roster isn’t as focused on the global aspect that rivals Street Fighter or Tekken lean on, where every fighter is distinctly pulled from a different fighting style or nationality.

Without prior knowledge to Fatal Fury’s roster or storyline, many of the characters can seem somewhat stock — there’s a couple of tough guys with various fighting styles and cool jackets, and some cartoonishly buxom female fighters peppered in for some old school gooner bait.

But despite some overlap and genericness in their archetypes, the design of each character allows their personalities to shine through. New additions like the nefarious assassin Vox Reaper (who practices dark karate?) and bookish kickboxer Preecha fit right in with series’ mainstays Terry, Mai, and Rock Howard.

Unlike games like Mortal Kombat 1 or Tekken 8, which lean into heightened realism for character designs, or Street Fighter 6, which uses greatly exaggerated physical models with graffiti-like embellishments (because it’s in the streets), City of the Wolves is instead inspired by a comic book aesthetic that gives it a very distinct vibe.

Characters are highly detailed but aren’t bound to either an overly realistic or simplistic anime design; each resembles a fluid realization of a pen and ink drawing, down to the Ben-Day dots that shade in each person’s skin tone with texture. It genuinely looks like a comic book brought to life.

The biggest issue with City of the Wolves’ characters isn’t that they’re mundane or lacking in personality, but that the game does little to catch players up with who they all are. There’re two main single-player modes — a story-like mode called Episodes of South Town and a classic arcade mode — each of which tells a different narrative for each character throughout.

Yet those stories don’t really overlap; EOST (as it’s abbreviated in-game) is something like an extended tutorial for newcomers wherein they get little mission markers that lead to bouts across the map. In between, there’s mostly dialogue text dumps connecting things together with a very slim story, but there’s very little work done to provide information on who these people are and how they’re historically connected.

Arcade does a little more, with some static image cut-scenes in between certain matches that push the plot along with slightly more flair (at least visually) and tells a more coherent story that actually incorporates the characters and their relationships. But even then, subtitles fail to identify who is speaking, which leads to head scratching moments when older franchise characters appear for cameos with zero context about who they are or why they matter.

Not all fighting games necessarily need a massive, twisty plot, but in recent years series like Mortal Kombat and Tekken have stepped up to match their technical prowess with more complex storytelling. MK titles are praised for their single-player modes that feature sprawling fantasy narratives that feel more in line with blockbuster action games. Tekken plays out as a globetrotting action movie with pro wrestling-level soap opera theatrics. By comparison Fatal Fury is left in the past with two modes with equally anemic storytelling, even by the genre’s low standards.

It wouldn’t be a big deal otherwise, but for a game that’s really trying to sell a triumphant return after a quarter century hiatus and pulling double duty to introduce itself to new fans, there’s very little being done to catch people up.

A real bout

The lack of handholding (or basic onboarding) also applies to the gameplay. While there’s a few solid tutorials with different missions to walk players through the game’s many systems, and Episodes of South Town provides its own entry level on-ramp, many of the features in the tutorials are lacking compared to other games. Even in the move lists, certain icons go without explanation. Punch and kick are clearly assigned to specific buttons but REV (an essential ability to powering up other movies and unlocking bigger ones) isn’t obviously defined. It took trial and error pressing literally every button in every combination to understand which of the keys triggered REV status.

There are also many systems to contend with that can be slightly impenetrable for newcomers. Picking up the game with any familiarity with the genre isn’t too hard — it feels superficially identical to games like Street Fighter in terms of pacing, controls, and command inputs (and in some ways even easier). If you’ve ever executed a hadouken or hurricane kick with Ryu or Ken, you’ve already got the skill to execute pretty much any attack in the City of the Wolves.

But the game is very aggressively-minded in terms of both offense and defense. While modern games like Street Fighter 6 and Mortal Kombat 1 have introduced easily executed, unstoppable abilities that allow newbies to break up a barrage of unending hits and get some breathing room from their opponents, City of the Wolves can leave you feeling utterly defenseless pretty quickly.

Once terms like REV Blow, REV Arts, REV Accel, and REV Guard begin to have meaningful application, the game opens up to feel much more balanced. But that’s assuming the Terminator-like CPU (or other players for that matter) don’t instantly crush your soul.

In most fighting games, things like parries, feints, and special types of blocks can often be ignored by casual players, existing more as a toolkit for high-level competitors to go deep on the litany of mechanics on their way to building deep strategies. City of the Wolves isn’t interested in letting anyone off the hook. Even making an attempt at arcade mode on the base difficulty (three out of five) will very likely end in many losses and occasionally blinding frustrations as CPU-controlled combatants utilize every move in the playbook with surgical precision.

It evokes the downright brutality of a Nineties era arcade game — which may be the core appeal for existing fans and fighting game community diehards, but it’s not very welcoming for people who just want to get into this from a glance.

But after beating your head against the proverbial wall long enough to see through the matrix, City of the Wolves opens up into one of the best and most complex fighting games there is. Hits are impactful and satisfying, and combos are fairly easy to execute (and be turned against you), and every minor breakthrough feels earned. Technically, every move and ability is easy to do, it’s just a matter of finding a rhythm and reading the terrain.

That might sound obvious; yes, you need to learn how to play the game. But where other modern franchises have found a sweet spot in coddling players just enough to give them the confidence to want to play and improve, City of the Wolves could easily quell any desire to commit with impunity.

If the goal was entirely to recreate and update a near 35-year-old formula to razor sharp precision, then Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves is an undisputed success. But any attempt to draw in newcomers begins and ends with saying, “It’s just like Street Fighter” and dropping in gonzo stunt-casting with real life people like viral DJ Salvatore Ganacci and legendary footballer Cristiano Ronaldo (wait, what?) as playable characters.

It’s guaranteed to become an esports icon at professional gaming events like Evo, but for normies, Fatal Fury might just remain stuck in obscurity.

Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves launches on April 24 for PlayStation 4 & 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows PC. Early access for players who have pre-ordered the game begins today.