Although the wild wolf has been dormant in his own series for 25 years now, Fatal Fury is finally coming back and doing so in a really big way.
I was able to spend over two hours going hands on with a demo for Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves thanks to SNK, and I walked away feeling like almost all of my expectations were exceeded.
Upon first seeing the game in motion, I was surprised at how good it looked in terms of both fidelity and art style.
The similarities to Marvel vs. Capcom 3 were immediately apparent in the best ways with the ’90s comic book aesthetic using cross hatching, deep shadows and half-tones to make Fatal Fury really stand out and also serve as like a nice evolution over what SNK did with Samurai Shodown.
I’d say the new trailers didn’t do City of the Wolves full justice with its visual effects and animations looking very crisp running directly on the PlayStation 5.
There is admittedly a ton of different effects that are popping up on the screen in short order, but I never really felt overwhelmed or like it lacked clarity when it mattered since each mechanic is very distinct in its color usage and what types of visuals it employs.
Gameplay didn’t just feel like a re-tooling of King of Fighters 15, but instead, a true sequel to Garou: Mark of the Wolves in terms of feel as well as bringing back almost every notable mechanic from the 1999 classic.
And then they added like 10 layers on top of that while making the gameplay more smooth.
Let’s discuss more about what makes Fatal Fury tick here in 2024.
Obviously, the heart of City of the Wolves is built around the all-new REV System, which introduces both offensive and defensive mechanics to make matches more interesting and exciting than every before in the series.
As can be seen briefly in the trailer, each character has a REV Meter at the bottom of the screen that works similarly to Street Fighter 6’s Drive Gauge except in reverse.
The REV Meter begins each round at 0% and progressively fills with each successive REV Action performed or when using regular blocks on defense.
It’ll continuously go down as no actions are being performed and do so even faster when hitting the opponent or even walking / dashing towards them also like SF6.
Managing that push and pull of the system is going to be key to success in this game and its extremely high skill ceiling.
REV Arts bring EX special moves to Fatal Fury, which work pretty much how you expect them to, but that’s not the exciting part.
REV Accel is the real game changer here considering it’s the mechanic that lets you chain together multiple REV Arts into one string and produce some really flashy combos and setups that were never possible before.
You can do say Rock’s EX Hard Edge into EX Rising Tackle into EX Shippuu Ken (because yes, he has Geese’s air fireball now), and each cancel leaves behind a cool after image so you can tell what’s taking place without getting totally lost.
Each REV Art, however, uses just under 25% of your REV Meter, so multiple Accels get very costly very quickly.
When used correctly, REV Arts and Accels can extend combos like never before in Fatal Fury and can confirm into or sometimes into OTG into Supers (called Ignition and Redline Gears) for extra big damage.
The only potential knock against the system I had was performing REV Accels felt highly committal, and you couldn’t just hit confirm on sight to keep the combo going.
For most specials I encountered, it felt like you had to input the next REV Art almost immediately after the first, so Accels aren’t fully free flow like you’d find with Roman Cancels in Guilty Gear.
Some characters, specifically Tizoc, also have some more stringent rules on them as to what will and won’t work for Accel cancels, which does make sense for a grappler.
These aren’t necessarily bad things depending on your perspectives on this design choice, but I do kinda hope they’ll make the cancel windows a bit more relaxed for the full release.
Overall, I just kept trying to think of more and more ways to use Accel in cool ways, and most of the time it worked, which just made me want to do even more.
Besides REV Accel, using REV Guard was actually some of the most fun I had playing the game, and that’s really surprising to me.
By holding down R1 on the standard PlayStation controller, your character pulls up a bubble shield in front of them that you can hold down.
It works very similarly to Faultless Defense in Guilty Gear where blocked attacks will push the opponent back further than regular guarding to help get out of potentially oppressive situations and create som
e space.
Holding the shield down and successfully blocking attacks, however, does build the REV Meter somewhat quickly, so you do have to be careful not to rely on it all of the time.
The real fun for me came from the movement options you can get out of REV Guard to help blend defense, offense and spacing all together.
Pressing forward while holding down R1 lets you instantly cancel the shield into a dash, back makes you back dash and up plus forward or back makes you hop, which feels really strong for fast characters like Hotaru especially.
There’s way more defensive options in City of the Wolves too on top of that, but we’ll get into that in a bit.
Those familiar with Fatal Fury and Mark of the Wolves specifically will also find a bunch of other familiar mechanics and systems that have been revamped with more to do.
T.O.P. Mode is now S.P.G. (Selective Potential Gear) and works similarly as a temporary boost that can be selected for the beginning, middle or ending third of your life bar.
While active, S.P.G. gradually increases health, buffs attack strength, REV Actions use less meter, and power gauge builds up in larger increments for Supers.
Moreover, S.P.G. also gives you access to the REV Blow attack by pressing heavy punch and kick together, which performs an armored attack on both the ground and air with a green glow — like Terry’s aerial Crack Shoot.
For other familiar mechanics, Braking certain specials is back to let you cancel out of the startup of some moves like Rising Tackle to make them less punishable, but more importantly open the door to bigger combos.
Feints are back too to fake out the opponent with a special that never comes to up the mind games and can apparently also be used to cancel out of normals for different combo routes.
On the defensive, Just Defense is back when perfectly blocking just before the attack connects, which goes into Guard Cancel to interrupt your defense and counter straight into specials, Supers and More.
You can’t block in the air, but there is air Just Defense for an additional layer too.
There’s also something called Hyper Defense by pressing forward or down-forward while blocking multi-hit attacks. I didn’t get to test that to learn exactly how that works, but that’s another defensive option too.
And then there’s Low and High Dodge Attacks to round out most of the returning mechanics found in Garou.
That means there is no multiple lane switching like the early Fatal Fury games though, but all the new stuff more than makes up for that.
Like SF6’s Burnout state, going over 100% REV Meter puts your character in a Overheating phase where they glow red.
What’s more important, however, is that while Overheating, you can’t perform any REV Actions at all until the meter reaches 0% again, which can be mitigated by going on the offensive like mentioned above.
This is also where the Guard Meter comes into play since you can also be guard broken when Overheating, and it seems you can only take like 5–7 hits in quick succession before you’re opened up.
We’re not sure of any other downsides at the moment, but it’s clear you want to be careful not to put yourself in that situation very often.
I got to try out all five of the characters shown in the new trailers between Terry, Rock, Hotaru, Tizoc and newcomer Preecha though most of my time was spent grinding matches with Hotaru against an SNK rep.
Each character feels like a fun evolution over what we previously saw in Garou with basically all of their old moves plus new options like Rocks air fireball and Rage Run options.
Hotaru felt like a fast combo monster who could attack anywhere from mid and close range on the ground and in the air with REV Accel working well for her combos and lived up to my expectations of wanting her back and then some.
Tizoc is hard to say much because I’m not big on grapplers, but his CPU was kicking my butt hard at the start of the play session — and he’s got multiple advancing moves to help him get in including a command grab.
Terry is Terry and hits like a truck with his EX Power Dunk starting out as a diagonal Rising Tackle, which is cool to see and use.
Preecha was the most interesting of course as the newcomer and apprentice of Joe Higashi. She’s got multiple attacks with follow-up options to make her combos longer as well as the ability to kick tornadoes in a similar fashion to Lucia’s fireballs in Street Fighter 5.
It was difficult to determine how good she was in this demo, but it seems she does have quite a bit of potential even if it feels like she may need to get in some more hits than the others on the present roster.
Fatal Fury is introducing what is essentially their own take on SF6’s Modern Control type that works in a fairly similar fashion that they’re currently calling Smart Style.
It’s completely separate from Arcade Style as the standard and is selected before picking a character, and there’s no auto-combos in Arcade Style like in KOF15.
In Smart Style, you’ve got one punch button, one for kick, special and combos as well as REV Guard, Throw, REV Blow and Dodge attack on the shoulder buttons.
Specials are performed with a direction plus triangle on PS5 though you can still manually perform them with motions except for some limitations and exceptions.
Pressing circle gives you an auto combo that is flashy, but seems pretty one-note right now. It also uses up almost all of the resources you have available.
I only messed around with Smart Style for a few matches. It felt serviceable for what it is right now, but I hope they can expand more on it as development progresses.
Matches in Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves felt fast but not frantic and left me constantly wanting / thinking about more, and I still am.
There’s a good sense of push and pull with this game so far with just as many defensive options as there were offensive ones, and even if you aren’t using them all, you can still have exhilarating games.
After my extended play session, I still felt like I was barely scratching the surface of what’s possible and not even knowing what is possible to perform in this game.
SNK really seems to be trying to step their game up even higher to keep pace with the competition and in some regards potentially even better with the way mechanics can flow together.
The skill ceiling feels like it could be higher than ever before thanks to the REV System and returning / revamped Garou systems, but even at the ground level, it feels good with plenty to do.
My only real complaint was the backgrounds in stages were not nearly as detailed and fleshed out, and the demo character select screen left something to be desired though that’s all stuff that can be polished and adjusted in the long lead up to release.
I walked away thinking City of the Wolves could easily become my favorite SNK game and arguably the best they’ve ever done if it keeps this trajectory, so stay tuned for more coverage on the return of Fatal Fury.