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Does SNK’s full course meal satisfy the hungry wolves after 26 years of waiting?

After 26 years, SNK’s original fighting game franchise has returned to us with Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves and despite the long hiatus, it’s showing up big time and has a lot of expectations pinned to it.

But does it match the hype? After having waited since 1999’s Garou: Mark of the Wolves, die-hard fans definitely a built up hype and even players who are brand new to the series will come in with some lofty expectations after hearing of the series’ legacy as well as knowing the fact that this is where Terry Bogard of Super Smash Bros., Street Fighter, King of Fighters and even Fall Guys fame originates from. So how well does Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves hold up to what players might be hoping for?

City of the Wolves attempts to blend together SNK’s classic styles with those of the modern day using both visual and sound design, which the developers largely seem to have succeeded at.

The new Fatal Fury is very colorful in almost every regard that is pleasing to look at without feeling overwhelming even if there can be quite a lot going on in the action.

Characters are especially vibrant and detailed in their models, so this is easily the best the SNK fighters have looked in 3D outside of Samurai Shodown 2019’s style arguably.

There’s also heavy shading on the characters as well as heavy cross hatches that give off a cool comic book vibe similar to Marvel vs. Capcom 3.

The game has a lot going on in terms of battle effects between regular specials, REV Arts, REV Blows and all the other mechanics, but it never really messes with the visual readability of what’s going on and adds more flair to the action.

REV Arts especially have a really nice after image effect on them when canceled that looks unique and cool to bring an extra layer of nice visuals to the experience that stand out next to the competition.

Menus are visually consistent with their yellow and black color schemes that are pleasant enough to look at, but can feel somewhat basic at times compared to the rest of the game’s style.

Some menus, however, force you to use a cursor to navigate, which isn’t the fastest or most intuitive feeling on controller or stick.

The character select screen harkens back to the classic Fatal Fury days of lining up the entire roster next to each other, which is cool and nostalgic on paper, but we wish they went a little farther or got a little more creative with it.

Characters are all just standing there in a default or static pose, and they don’t take up a lot of the screen real estate too. It would have been more interesting to have a more dynamic layout similar to something like Fatal Fury 3.

There’s a whopping 19 stages to choose from with a mix of new and classic arenas including two versions of Geese Tower and the train, which is neat, but the latter probably won’t be very popular to use considering the movement feels like it could cause motion sickness as well as seemingly not running as well as the others.

Stages are also vibrant, colorful and dynamic with what’s going on in the background, however, the graphical fidelity is definitely a step down compared to the main roster.

This is especially true with background characters, who look like PlayStation 3 era models.

Music wise, Fatal Fury’s new main themes offer a nice mix of jazz and big band styles with bombastic brass sections that fit well and give off the classic vibes the game is going for.

Character and stage themes are much more spread out in terms of genre to fit the fighters and arenas from rock to classical and electronic along with the collaboration DJ tracks, so there’s no shortage of music to pick from, especially with the Jukebox.

The Jukebox offers classic soundtracks from a wide array of past SNK titles, obviously mostly focusing on the Fatal Fury series, but also including other favorites like the Art of Fighting games and a select few King of Fighters tracks which relate to Fatal Fury characters specifically.

Through the Jukebox, you can not just make your own playlists to listen to but you can also customize which songs you want to play on certain stages, the character select or even the main menu, giving you a large variety of classic sounds to jam out to even if the new tunes aren’t to your taste.

One more thing to enjoy is a throwback feature which long-time fighting game players will be quite familiar with, namely Color Edit.

In Color Edit you can make several customized colors for any character you want and switch up their hair color, eye color, clothes and more. With the full spectrum of colors available, you can really unleash your creativity and make your own versions of whichever character you like, so expect to see a lot of crazy customizations online.

If you’re more of a purist, though, don’t worry — you can choose to disable customized colors from showing up in online matches, so if you prefer seeing characters as you typically would know them you can just flip a switch and be all set.

City of the Wolves looks and runs great on PlayStation 5 and PC with no apparent issues that we’ve noticed, but the same can’t exactly be said for the PlayStation 4 version.

Even on the PS4 Pro, Fatal Fury can have a lot of screen tearing because it seems V-Sync has been forced off, which can be a bit distracting, as well as the texture load in whenever a new character appears on screen.

Load times are certainly present on all versions, but they aren’t noticeably long except for the PS4 version that can hang on a black screen for upwards of 10 seconds in places like Arcade Mode.

The kickoff point for the story in Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves is that even after Geese’s demise back in the original Fatal Fury game, the chaos surrounding South Town is far from over.

With new invitations being sent out for a King of Fighters tournament, familiar faces gather once more to battle it out in the hopes of earning a mysterious prize referred to only as “Geese’s legacy.”

Although the nature of this prize is unclear, the promise of it is more than enough for characters of all different walks of life to endeavor to earn it, which is the starting point for each character’s individual stories.

For players, the return to South Town has been 26 years in the making but for the characters in-universe, only about one year has passed so things aren’t all that different from where they left off in Garou: Mark of the Wolves.

That said, there’s plenty of new developments for characters to go through and see where they’ve ended up since we last saw them or what new goals they may have and these are predominately told through the game’s Arcade Mode.

Pushing even further with the comic book aesthetic present in the game overall, characters will be introduced through panels as if they’re stepping right out of a comic book page before you fight them and once you reach the later stages of your Arcade Mode path, there will be more intricate narratives shown.

While not all characters have any super serious plot developments (B. Jenet for example is mostly just annoyed that she didn’t get the treasure she wanted last time around), you’re definitely going to get a good view of what motivates each character and what keeps them in South Town.

Not only are there lots of interactions between the playable cast but there are also tons of cameos from other Fatal Fury or Art of Fighting characters who relate to the story in various ways, including ones we know are coming later like Mr. Big who has a notable role in the story through several perspectives.

Fitting to the various objectives and end goals of characters, there are also several different possible end bosses you can fight, contrary to the usual Arcade Mode fare many fighting games follow where there is one specific set boss character that every character will face.

As you may expect, the Garou: Mark of the Wolves boss character Kain R. Heinlein as well as that game’s sub-boss Grant’s new disciple Vox Reaper are both characters you may run into as your final fight in Arcade Mode, but there are also some other surprise showdowns in store depending on who’s story path you choose to embark on.

Even though it’s been a long time since we last saw the Fatal Fury characters and their world up close, the same team that worked on Garou: Mark of the Wolves all those years ago were also involved in this game and, well, it shows.

You know how sometimes you have those friendships where you may not see each other for years, but once you do it feels as if nothing’s changed at all? That’s the feeling that Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves gives to me, so for any Fatal Fury fans it will be a very welcome return to South Town and its inhabitants.

For those hopping into the series for the first time or are looking for a refresher, CotW does not really offer any sort of primer or breakdown to help get you caught up. The game normally just assumes you know what’s going on with the characters after Garou.

Episodes of South Town serves as the mode with the most amount of story content, though its events are typically not as important as those found in Arcade Mode.

The new single-player mode plays out similarly to something like Mortal Kombat’s Towers mixed with Street Fighter Alpha 3’s World Tour where players take on challenge battles with special parameters.

There’s individual missions spread out across three maps that don’t tend to differ all that much, at least at the start.

You can level up your character by completing missions to gain more health, S.P.G., and abilities to equip to boost your fighter like increased attack and defense.

You can also earn avatars, artwork, fun character conversations and titles for completing certain missions and objectives in this mode.

Most of the fights are 1–4 battles against a selection of like six jobber characters with movesets based on other SNK characters, which is a bit neat, and the main cast shows up to fight in missions as well.

Even with the special parameters and enemy abilities, fights often play out mostly the same, so the action can start to feel stale after a while, especially when fighting those grunts over and over again (sometimes back to back within the same mission).

Enemies typically don’t put up too much of a challenge until you beat the main story and unlock South Town+, which offers up tougher missions at much higher levels.

The events are split up between 10 story missions per character with dozens of side challenges to complete, and it takes around 1–1.5 hours to complete with each character.

Episodes of South Town’s story is primarily told through text conversations without any voice acting, which is a bit disappointing when the rest of the game is voiced (even the side character conversations you unlock).

There’s artwork provided for the start and end of a character’s story as well though not as much as Arcade.

It also feels as though Episodes of South Town offers up more of a side story whereas the main or most important events are saved for Arcade as well, so you often feel as though you’re doing menial tasks until the next or last main story beat.

Interestingly, you can pick Salvatore Ganacci for Episodes of South Town, but not Cristiano Ronaldo, so the sporting superstar has no story here (though SNK has clarified that it will be added later.)

You can unlock a bottle-breaking mini-game with Marco, which seems to be the only one, where you unlock titles and avatars depending on the total completed number of bottles chopped and doesn’t really offer anything more besides testing your button input skills.

Ultimately, Episodes of South Town is fun enough for the first few runs through but feels as though it may get fairly tedious if you attempt to beat the mode with the whole cast.

The first mode which you’ll want to dive into is definitely the Tutorial. It may seem redundant for experienced fighting game players, but trust me, there’s a lot of systems in play for Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves and you’ll want to get first-hand experience with them fast.

While the systems aren’t that complex and are fairly straightforward to understand, getting a thorough explanation of the whole REV system, Brake mechanics and how the S.P.G. interacts with your abilities is very valuable.

Once you know what’s what, obviously a good place to brush up on your combos and what your character is fully capable of is the game’s Training Mode which comes equipped with most of what you’d want from it in a modern fighting game.

Frame data is available so you can easily see which moves will interact well with each other, recording and setting opponent’s to reversal on block or wakeup, basically all the fundamental things a training mode tends to offer is there without anything really feeling like it’s missing.

You can quickly change characters or stages in the training mode as well without having to go back to the character select menu and of course queue up for ranked or casual matches while labbing, so all the standard convenience options are present and accounted for.

Combo trials are present in City of the Wolves, however, we do wish they covered more than what’s available.

There’s only five trials for Arcade Style and three for Smart Style, which do get progressively more complex as you go through them.

The main issue is they tend to tie in together, so you’re learning bigger / harder combo routes building off of largely the same handful of moves.

This makes it feel as though you’re only really learning one or two aspects of what your character can do and leaves a lot on the table as to what is actually possible in the game.

We would have liked to see those trial numbers doubled to cover more moves and give better ideas of what you should put into practice.

They do force you to learn how to Brake specials, though, so that’s a nice skill to pick up from there.

There’s also Survival and Time attack modes to select from under the Missions tab as well that are what you’d expect out of them.

At first glance, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves feels like a very basic fighting game with fairly short combos and with a heavy focus on confirming your hits.

The latter part definitely stays true, but once you get used to the system mechanics there’s quite a lot of juice you can squeeze out of your combos thanks to the REV System itself.

It’s quite reminiscent of Street Fighter 6’s Drive system at first glance, though it’s a meter that goes upwards instead of depleting (whereas you want to have high Drive in Street Fighter 6, you want to stay on low REV in Fatal Fury.)

While the basics of it are similar, the functions of it are actually quite different with one of the central uses of the REV Gauge once you get used to it is to extend your combos by cancelling your REV Arts (EX moves) into each other leading to massive combos.

Once you add in the Brake system to this, where you can cancel certain moves mid-way through them, thereby opening up entirely new combo routes or even letting you make risky moves more safe on block or whiff.

Then on top of that there’s also the S.P.G. system, which has the same basic idea as the T.O.P. system from Garou: Mark of the Wolves, where you get to pick one third of your HP bar where you’ll have enhanced abilities.

One of these is the REV Blow, an armored move which you can use to crush through your opponent’s offense at the cost of increasing your REV Gauge somewhat and another S.P.G. exclusive feature is your Hidden Gear, that is to say an even stronger Super Move than you’d usually have access to which does massive damage and also pulls your REV down to 0, making it a highly valuable combo ender tool.

There’s also the Feint option where you can fake doing certain special moves to mix your opponents up and fool them into reacting to something that’s not actually coming as well as the Wild Punish which is basically a very brutal punishment state where you hit someone in their recovery frames. Combining Feints to then let you whiff punish can lead to massive damage in this way.

All of these systems together make the combo system feel very intricate and like there’s actually a lot of routes you can find for your character, though there’s likely that optimal routes will be found before long so the variety may lessen as the game goes on.

Whatever the case, there’s a lot more to do as far as combo goes than you’d think at first, so while the core lies in basic confirms and short combos, learning how to efficiently make use of your REV Gauge to cash out massive damage or pressure is going to be the key to overwhelming your opponent.

There’s also a lot of defensive options, though, with Just Defense being back. Unlike regular blocking, Just Defend can be performed in the air so you can bait opponent’s anti-air attacks if you’ve got a good read on them and punish them by defending their attack and then launching a counterattack afterwards. It also gives you some health back and decreases your REV Gauge.

To follow up on Just Defense, you also have Hyper Defense which has a traditional parry input, which is to say pressing forward or down forward right when a move is about to hit. Functionally, it’s the same as Just Defense, but the purpose of having these in both directions is that you can land Guard Cancel special moves out of either Just Defense or Hyper Defense to interrupt your opponents attacks.

Finally, you have access to a button-based block function called REV Guard which is somewhat similar to Street Fighter 6’s Drive Parry in that it can allow you to block crossups without pushing the correct direction, but the key function of it is that it pushes opponents back further and negates chip damage, though it costs you some REV Gauge to use it.

All of these systems together make for a highly varied gameplay experience and it always feels like there’s something you can do in situations even if you may feel overwhelmed at first. Basically, there’s always an answer if you just dive deep to solve it.

The other aspect of gameplay is of course, the characters. A healthy mix of returning Garou: Mark of the Wolves cast members such as B. Jenet and Tizoc together with old-school Fatal Fury classics like Mai and Billy and a few brand new fighters sprinkled in makes for a highly varied roster of exciting characters.

Most of the buzz has surrounded the strange guest character choices of real-life people with football superstar (soccer superstar if you’re American) Cristiano Ronaldo and famed DJ Salvatore Ganacci. While it’s understandable that some would feel that the prospect of adding real-life people into the game is questionable, their movesets are actually very well-crafted and interesting.

Basically, if you’re not feeling good about the introduction of these guest characters that’s totally understandable, but just based on their movesets it feels like these characters would be entirely embraced by the community if they were just newcomers with the exact same moves.

Hopefully fans can keep an open mind and try them out to see just how fun they are to actually play, even if they may have initially been apprehensive at having real-life celebrities walking around South Town.

What makes the roster really shine is the high variety of gameplay styles present here. If you like zoning, grappling, mixups, rushdown, it doesn’t really matter — all of it is present in the launch roster of 17 characters and it’s highly unlikely you’ll find yourself without anyone to pick.

Another boon to this is that if you pre-ordered the game, the next five characters releasing — Andy Bogard, Joe Higashi, Mr. Big and Street Fighter guest characters Ken Masters and Chun-Li — will all be available for free, so there’s even more cast to enjoy with many more post-launch fighters planned for the coming years.

In short, the roster choices and moveset designs in the game are absolutely fantastic and it’s going to be very interesting to see which characters end up rising to the top of tier lists once skilled players start figuring out the game’s deeper layers.

On top of the standard control scheme (called Arcade Style in this game), City of the Wolves also offers a new simplified Smarty Style as well.

This is akin to Street Fighter 6’s modern controls with the four main buttons now dedicated to punch, kick, specials and a smart combo as well as buttons for REV Guard, Throw, REV Blow and Dodge Attack on the shoulders.

Unlike SF6, however, there appears to be no damage reduction or any other downside to using Smart over Arcade Style.

You normally only get your light normals, but you keep the heavies too by pressing forward and down-forward plus punch / kick.

This of course means that Smart players will have access to one button specials and Gear Supers too, which can be quite strong depending on the character.

All you’re really missing out on seemingly is one of your jumping normals and the ability to use different strengths of specials.

If your character has more than four specials, some of those could be unavailable too, but you can still perform standard inputs in the mode too to get them back.

Even for players who like their traditional inputs, Smart Style could be a good way to try out different characters to see what they have to offer and what their combo routes can look like.

A few members of our team did run into a potential glitch on the PC version with certain arcade sticks seemingly locking controls for a second or two after landing a counter hit both offline and online. We tested other sticks that didn’t have any problems, however, so we’re unsure as to how prevalent it could be.

Hopefully this will be fixed in a patch at or close to release so that everyone can enjoy the game normally regardless of what controller they’re playing on.

Playing online is where many users will be spending a majority of their time with the new Fatal Fury, so how does that part of the experience hold up?

Well the game comes with rollback netcode and cross-platform play, which is pretty much standard now as it should be.

There’s Ranked Match, Casual Match and Room Match options available to set up lobbies that work as you’d expect with quick search options for the former and the ability to wait in Training Mode.

Room Matches can be a little clunky to get set up especially with the need to use long room codes and friend codes to get things going, but in them you can get up to 12 players and six different matches going at the same time.

You can even set which battle stations are meant for regular fights and those that can be used for online training, which is a nice touch, but you cannot spectate a match once it’s already started.

We weren’t able to get in a ton of matches against many opponents during the review process, but from what we tested of the netcode, it was quite good — though not on the same level as Street Fighter 6.

From the Midwest to the East and West coast, the matches were completely playable, and even further, Midwest to Sweden on a two-bar connection was almost totally fine with only a few instances of slowdown.

There is information included at the top of the screen to not only show your ping to your opponent, but also the rollback and delay frames, which is nice to see.

City of the Wolves also features a Clone mode where you can battle against the AI ghost of your own characters, other players’ characters and even those of the SNK staff.

Clones are supposed to learn from how you fight in online matches as well as how others battle by downloading their replay data.

We weren’t able to test much with the feature, but Clones did seem to copy our moves and setups decently though they’d sometimes whiff moves at a distance too, which could have come from our connection tests.

Overall, we were quite pleased with Fatal Fury’s online performance, however, we don’t yet know how the matchmaking search feature will be holding up since release since the betas did have some issues there.

We reviewed Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves on PC (Steam), PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 Pro via copies provided to us by SNK. Contributions to this review were made by Nicholas “MajinTenshinhan” Taylor and Dakota “DarkHorse” Hills.

Make sure to check out our moves section for Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves as well as our news section for the game where any future updates or information about SNK’s latest fighter will be posted.