Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves Is A Great Fighting Game With Even Greater Baggage

By Elijah Gonzalez | April 21, 2025 | 3:00am

Video Games Reviews Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves

Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves Is A Great Fighting Game With Even Greater Baggage

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Despite Terry Bogard’s recent appearances in everything from Street Fighter to Super Smash Bros., the fighting game series he originates from, Fatal Fury, has been dormant for decades: the last installment was Garou: Mark of the Wolves, which came out way back in 1999. In the years since, Garou has often been revered by many oldheads as one of the genre’s greats thanks to its speed and style, putting it on the same playing field as other standouts of that era, like Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike and Marvel vs. Capcom 2.

But despite it seeming like Fatal Fury died alongside the arcade era, against all odds, Terry is finally back on his home turf with today’s release of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, a rewarding fighting game that mixes throwback elements with fights that hit hard. These high-tempo battles feature aggression alongside a long list of defensive countermeasures, giving it an excellent balance between traditional genre entries, like Street Fighter, and more aggressive anime-style ones. Its central scuffles are such a blast that many genre veterans will likely be tempted to forgive its average single-player offerings and the unnecessary frustrations caused by its missing features. Unfortunately, there’s an even greater catch: its eyebrow-raising guest characters and, most importantly, the organization that funded it.

Before we get into that, though, let’s go over the basics. City of the Wolves is a four-button fighter, meaning there are four main buttons for punches and kicks, which at least on the surface level, makes it slightly less immediately overwhelming than trying to play with Classic controls in six-button games like Street Fighter. The standard attacks that come from hitting these buttons tend to have solid range, allowing for whiff punishes and poke-based play, which when combined with the absence of a universal get-in-your-opponent’s-face type move (like SF6’s Drive Rush, Tekken 8’s Heat Engagers, or Granblue Versus Rising’s dash attacks) means there’s very much room for some subtle and gratifying spacing battles as you and your foe jockey for position.

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At the same time, though, the pace of play can also be quick and explosive thanks to the generally fast horizontal movement speed and multiple types of jumps at your disposal. You can do a standard jump, a short hop, or a dash jump, each coming with unique angles that make approaching in the air a strong option. If properly timed, you can even block in the air by hitting back at the right time, similar to an air parry in Third Strike, making it safer to approach this way than in many other games. This mobility gives these scraps a rapid, exciting feel.

Fatal Fury City of the Wolves

However, this aerial flexibility is cleverly counterbalanced by one of the game’s most satisfying mechanics: Breaking. Breaking lets you cancel out of some special moves partway through their animation, which means the start of the attack comes out but not the whole thing. This helps with sniping opponents out of the air because when you combine this ability with a Ryu-style uppercut, you can start this special move, cancel it after connecting with an opponent who is mid-jump, and then perform a series of follow-ups where you juggle them like a volleyball in a stylish and damaging combo. It feels downright excellent every time you blow up a jump-in attempt this way, and the threat of being able to respond to airborne approaches with a devastating punish adds a compelling risk-reward dynamic that makes you look before you leap. This is just one way that Breaks can be used, and when combined with Feints, which similarly let you cancel the end lag of regular moves, adds fulfilling layers of complexity without overcomplicating things.

Beyond this, the game also uses the REV system, a Street Fighter 6-inspired meter mechanic where instead of starting with an empty resource bar that charges up over a match to be spent on powered-up abilities, you instead start off being able to use enhanced specials and other techniques with the risk of “Overheating” your REV bar if you use too many in succession. While Overheated, you can’t use any REV moves, and if you block for too long, your guard will break, leaving you wide open—simply put, being in this state isn’t a good time! What makes the REV system interesting is that it gives you many options right from the start of the match, which opens up strategies while also adding a compelling tension between using these strong abilities and the threat of ending up in Overheat. These REV-enhanced special moves are particularly important here because they can be canceled into each other by spending more meter, letting you set up creative pressure and combos that grant these fights a freeform feel.

That said, much like how well-timed anti-airs can counteract the strength of jumps, City of the Wolves’ defensive depth allows skilled players to escape their opponent’s offense. You can spend REV meter while guarding to push your foe away, perform Just Defends to chain a perfectly timed block into a reversal, and more. This means that you can turn the tide at any moment, especially if you have a strong understanding of your opponent’s habits, encouraging interactivity rather than one person running identical pressure sequences over and over. Add in a (mostly) compelling cast of characters with unique abilities, and you have the ingredients for a rich and deep experience.

However, while the core gameplay is largely excellent, there is one blemish that will hopefully become less pronounced with time: REV Blows are pretty irritating at the moment! These armored attacks let you shrug off incoming strikes while delivering a fairly damaging blow for the cost of some REV meter. If there’s a main catch to using REV Blows, it’s that they can only be used when your health bar is in a specific range: you choose at the start of a match if it’s active in the first, second, or third chunk of your life bar. But while they’re only available about a third of the time, the issue with these moves is that, on top of ignoring incoming blows, they aren’t punishable on block, meaning it can be hard to counteract an opponent who is using them belligerently.

Although you can counter a REV Blow with your own to set up a juicy combo, this can only be done if you also happen to be in a specific health threshold. There are other counters, too, like using Super to break through or High Dodge Attacks to duck under them, but the issue with REV Blows is that when they’re active, they take a game with lots of options and make it hyperfocused around using or counteracting a single move, which dramatically simplifies play. Maybe players will find strong, consistent counter-measures, but even if they do, REV Blows will probably remain annoying to deal with at lower levels of play. Thankfully, they’re not always available, and only some characters’ versions of these are truly nightmarish to deal with (Kaine’s projectiles combined with his screen-crossing REV Blow will give you a migraine), meaning this mechanic isn’t enough to tarnish the otherwise excellent fisticuffs, but hopefully this will eventually be minimized in patches.

Outside the mostly well-tuned fireball chucking action, the other offerings and features are fairly standard. There’s an arcade mode where you receive a brief story setup for your fighter of choice, battle through CPU opponents, and then get their ending; refreshingly, many of these short stories are more substantive than you would expect, providing big developments for this long-absent cast. Beyond this, there is also Episodes of South Town, a mini-story mode where you pick a character and throw hands with thugs while leveling up and unlocking passive abilities. While that may sound a bit like Street Fighter 6’s World Tour mode, the scope is much more limited here, as you select battles from a map instead of roaming an open world. These fights are relatively similar and a bit repetitive, but the mode makes for a reasonable two to three hours of bashing goons bookended by surprisingly decent narrative beats (my Rock Howard playthrough offered a pleasant riff on found family). Still, while Episodes of South Town and the arcade mode are a solid short-term diversion, they’re not substantive enough that I would recommend the game to folks disinterested in battling human opponents unless you’re a huge Fatal Fury fan.

As for how the multiplayer experience pans out, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Starting with the good, at least in the matches I played, the game’s rollback netcode provided a relatively smooth online experience when facing off against those with a halfway reasonable ping. On top of this, cross-play is enabled, which should help players find matches by opening things up between PS4, PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S.

That said, the City of the Wolves doesn’t have many of the bells and whistles that are hard not to miss in a post-Street Fighter 6 world. For instance, you can’t view whether your opponent is on a wired or wireless connection before starting a match, which matters because even with rollback netcode, a wireless connection can lead to choppy matches that are particularly irritating in a game like that requires such tight timings on defense.

Other oversights include the absence of separate competitive rankings for different characters, which means that playing as a new fighter can tank your hard-earned rank, and a somewhat wonky lobby system that has issues like not allowing you to copy and paste room codes. And while the game looks good in motion thanks to its stylish, comic-inspired aesthetic, the presentation outside of the core gameplay is much less impressive, with unappealing menus that are awkward to navigate. To top it off, the Training mode is very basic, making it difficult to practice specific scenarios, and the Tutorial is nothing to write home about, which makes it even more challenging for new players to get into the game.

However, beyond these annoyances that some will begrudgingly accept due to the game’s rewarding and interactive core gameplay, unfortunately, much larger real-world issues loom over things. First of all, a few years ago, the Saudi Arabian government’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) purchased a 96% stake in Fatal Fury’s publisher, SNK. In recent years, the Saudi government has arguably used the PIF to attempt to sanitize the country’s reputation, providing entertainment through sports leagues and more to draw attention away from its brutal human rights abuses, including the oppression of its citizens and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Videogames are just the latest in this “sportswashing” trend, with the PIF bankrolling SNK and scooping up Pokémon Go developer Niantic.

This connection is even harder to avoid in City of the Wolves due to its genuinely unhinged guest character selections: real-world soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo and DJ Salvatore Ganacci are somehow in this video game. Both have connections to the PIF, with Ronaldo playing in the Saudi Pro League and Ganacci performing sets in the country, which seems to be the only plausible explanation for why SNK would jarringly include two actual people in a game full of super-powered martial artists. While both of them admittedly play decently, Ronaldo’s character model looks wonky, and his presence puts a damper on this twenty-something-year return by denying better-suited established characters from the main roster. While SNK has said it plans to eventually add every existing Fatal Fury fighter via DLC, the decision to include actual human beings is still a huge misstep.

And much worse than the immersion-shattering quality of including real people is that out of the 8 billion humans on the planet, they choose one who has been accused of sexual assault: Cristiano Ronaldo. He was involved in a hush-money case related to a rape that allegedly occurred back in 2009. While the judge on that case eventually dismissed the lawsuit, this was seemingly on a technicality, as the documents used in the court proceedings (where Ronaldo arguably seems to have implied having nonconsensual sex with the woman) were acquired via an illegal data leak. It should be noted that Ronaldo’s lawyers claim that the documents in question were edited and fallacious, but it does not appear that they have publicly provided evidence of this being the case. The whole situation around the PIF’s majority stake in SNK and the way they seemingly influenced City of the Wolves’ roster is a mess, and it’s quite justified why many would sit this one out on moral compunctions.

It’s a bummer because outside that context, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves is admittedly a very good fighting game: it has interesting nuances thanks to things like Just Defence, Breaks/Feints, and its REV Gauge, while its fast-paced battles and throwback elements make it a breath of fresh air compared to many modern entries in the genre. Although it isn’t perfect, even when judged only as a game, the much larger issue is how this long-awaited return profits a government that’s done heinous things, which is even harder to ignore given that their overreach is seemingly present in the game itself in the form of bizarre character selections. I’m sure many Fatal Fury fans were thrilled when this game was announced, but unfortunately, the monkey’s paw curled.

Elijah Gonzalez is the assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.