Fatal Fury: City Of The Wolves PS5 Review. It’s been over 25 years since one of the oldest fighting game franchises, Fatal Fury, has seen a brand new instalment. Throughout those years, many genre stablemates have come and gone, and others have taken their place as the king of the genre.
Whether it’s Street Fighter, Tekken, Guilty Gear, or even SNK’s own King of Fighters, Fatal Fury’s return was also an uphill battle and though City of the Wolves is an excellent fighter, it’s lacking in its presentation and game modes, especially compared to what other fighters this day and age are producing.
Fatal Fury: City Of The Wolves PS5 Review
25 Years In The Making
Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves feels like it takes place 25 years after the last game, with the many visual changes the cast of fighters has received. Terry Bogard no longer sports his signature red jacket and baseball cap, and Mai will likely upset a particular fan base for opting for a more modern look over her more revealing outfit.
The game’s roster is also limited to only thirteen fighters and two guest fighters, including Cristiano Ronaldo and Swedish DJ Salvatore Ganacc, bringing the total to fifteen. This is a relatively small roster compared to the competition, such as Tekken, Street Fighter, and even King of Fighters, all of which have nearly double this amount.
Fans of Fatal Fury won’t care, though, because the cast of the franchise present here are returning greats, so that they will be familiar with them. There are, unfortunately, only two new characters added to the main roster.
Lacking In Content
City of the Wolves features your typical game modes: Arcade, Versus, Training, and Online battles, either Ranked or casual. The issue is that they are all pretty shallow. You can’t do team battles; there isn’t a fun lobby to run around in as you wait or watch others fight. It’s all very traditional.
There’s nothing wrong with tradition, but it could use a little more life, especially in the long run. There is one game mode you can choose and manipulate the settings, where you can fight with maxed out REV, Overheat, or never running out of S.P.G. More on these later.
Meanwhile, story mode allows you to select one of the fighters and complete their unique story. For example, Mai’s story involves her search for a mysterious Kunichi who has been terrrorising people in the city. Each story is different, but the mode plays like an RPG, though it doesn’t need to.
A Story Mode Filled With RPG Elements
You’ll select missions on a map and fight the opponent in said mission. Some of these missions require you to fight multiple opponents back-to-back. When you win, you gain EXP and level up, which increases your maximum health and, at times, unlocks skills you can equip that increase your damage, make your throws do extra damage, or gain Overheat faster.
Story missions pop up, and you experience the story through simple text bubbles and character portraits. The writing itself is good and at times comical, but with so much being done for story modes in fighting games like Mortal Kombat and Tekken, I feel almost spoiled by those games’ story modes, and as such City of the Wolves simply can’t match them.
Though it’s a nice system in theory, you can get through the entire story only by unlocking four or five skills out of about thirty. You can, of course, continue to replay the story and keep leveling up, but the battles don’t get any harder by level, and you can get to the point with your skills that you would defeat your opponents in a single combo. Which I was able to do by the time I finished the story mode with one character.
As you play, you unlock character art, audio conversations, and even a mini game where you break beer bottles by copying the inputs that appear on screen. Although there is plenty to unlock, it’s very time-consuming for what feel like shallow rewards.
SNK Is At Its Finest With Its Core Combat
The meat, as it always is with fighting games, is the actual combat. Thankfully, SNK doesn’t miss in this regard, and brawls are smooth and fast. Attacks are easy to execute, and for those who don’t want to put in too much effort, the Smart control scheme can be used, which maps special attacks to individual buttons and direction presses.
Even full combos are mapped to a single button, and pressing it repeatedly executes a powerful combination of attacks. You can, of course, play traditionally, where you have to input the proper rotations on the analog or d-pad with the corresponding face buttons.
Everything you would expect in a Fatal Fury fighter is here. Counter strikes, dodges, blocks, perfect blocks guard breaks. There are numerous systems that expert players can utilize to their advantage. The most important of these is the S.P.G. system.
You can select a portion of your health bar where the S.P.G. system will become active once your health reaches that point. This system unlocks new attacks that you can add to your combo moves. Some of them even counter and push through your opponent’s attacks.
Another new system is the REV system. This system enables you to utilize the REV system to augment your special attacks and arts during combat. Every time you use a REV ability, you’ll gain Heat. When your Heat meter is full, you enter Overheat mode.
Overheat will increase your attack damage, but also increase how much damage you take. You’ll also lose the ability to pull off some combos and attacks that utilize the REV system, as it becomes temporarily unavailable.
Unique Art Style, But Not The Best Character Designs
Visually, the game won’t blow you away. The character models and their outfits aren’t standouts, and their designs aren’t quite up to par with recent fighting games. The game employs the same distinctive art style as Samurai Shodown, which was introduced in 2008.
The soundtrack is very reminiscent of previous games in the franchise—a mix of rock and jazz. But like the majority of the game, there isn’t anything here that stands out. Voice work is also hit and miss; some characters sound great, others sound like they were recorded back in the 90s.
Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves took over 25 years to arrive. Now that it’s here, after such a long time, I expected SNK to put more effort into the game to gain as many players as possible. As it stands now, the game is specifically designed to enter the fighting game scene, and in that case, it’s sure to succeed. For everyone else, there isn’t enough here to keep them engaged for an extended period.
Fatal Fury: The City of the Wolves releases on April 24 on PS5, PS4, PC, and Xbox Series X/S.
Review code kindly provided by PR.