When people think of the pinnacle of 2D fighting games before the great collapse, they tend to point to Street Fighter 3: Third Strike. But standing shoulder to shoulder with that titan wasanothergorgeous sprite-based fighter thatalsofeatured a roster overhaul and a precision-based defensive mechanic: Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves.
Now, a quarter of a century later, that forgotten legend’s successor has arrived inFatal Fury: City of the Wolves. This new entry serves as a direct sequel to Mark of the Wolves while also adding its own flourishes. This wolf is clearly looking to grow its pack.In the process of widening its appeal, though, it does hit a snag or two.
An Elegant Mess Of Mechanics
It’s astounding just how many mechanics are packed into the core fighting experience. City of the Wolves sees the return of every last mechanic featured in Mark of the Wolves, and then some.
Notably, that includes the S.P.G. (Selective Potential Gear) mode, which allows you to select which third of your health bar triggers an enhanced form - granting you a unique attack as well as making your attacks hit harder. By choosing when it activates, you can decide if you want an early advantage, a comeback mechanic, or something in between. And you really feel that difference in battle, as entering into the S.P.G. form can shift the momentum decidedly.
The iconic parry-like Just Defend mechanic returns as well, allowing you to gain a little health regeneration and recover quicker as a reward for perfectly timing a block. As is typically the case with parries, landing these feels great.Are you Daigo Umahara?No. But landing a tidy sequence of Just Defends will let you pretend you are for a brief moment. These are just the tip of the iceberg; Mark of the Wolves is a mechanically dense game.
Just Defend can do nearly everything the Third Strike parry can, while also healing a little health and giving you the ability to counter if you have cracked reactions. What keeps it in check is how much faster Fatal Fury plays.
On top of the legacy mechanics, we have the REV system, which provides enhanced versions of special attacks at the cost of increasing your REV meter. Max out your REV meter and you lose access to those attacks. It is basically a variation of Street Fighter 6’s OD attacks and Burnout. This feels poetic, as SNK has made its name off of bilking some of Capcom’s best ideas. It’s nice to see them return to their roots.
Another thing City of the Wolves takes from Street Fighter 6 is the option to use simple inputs. So, if you are a modern player in SF6, you will feel right at home.
To top it all off, Rev Accel provides players with a flexible way to cancel specials into specials (at the cost of increasing your REV Gauge), allowing for expressive combos that you can string together on the fly. This type of mechanic has been present in a number of SNK games in different forms, but this one feels themostflexible iteration. And I’m just scratching the surface here. There’s a lot going on here! However, the way these mechanics bleed into each other makes it all feel remarkably intuitive.
If you are wondering, the online is excellent. We now live in the era of Rollback supremacy, and thank God for that.
The First Roster In A Fighting Game That Has Me Begging For Less
Fighting games live and die by their roster. By includingnearlythe entire Mark of the Wolves cast, City of the Wolves is off to a strong start. Notably, it also reintroduces Mai and Billy Cain - who’ve skipped a few entries. Both are welcome additions, even if Billy’s new outfit has two-year-old dressing themselves for the first time energy.
The new characters, Preecha and Vox Reeper, both add twists on familiar gameplay styles and fit right in with the established cast. And then there are the guest characters: Ronaldo and Salvatore Ganacci… Even the best guest character can feel a little cheap and gimmicky, but this pair really pushes the boundaries.
It is worth noting that SNK has made it clear that it intends to include as many classic Fatal Fury characters as possible,so at least we don’t need to be concerned about these goofs stealing a roster spot from a more deserving Fatal Fury veteran.
Thankfully, it isn’t all bad - the more I played around with him, the more I appreciated the off-beat absurdity of Salvatore Ganacci. By the time I saw him use his DJ powers to literally swim through the air, this random DJ had completely won me over.
Ronaldo, on the other hand, is hard to move past. His setup-heavy style of gameplay is fun to tinker around with, and his jab being a thumbs-up is hilarious, but he looks terrible and many of his attack animations almost appear unfinished. Also, having his name on the health bar just makes me feel a little queasy.
That’s the kicker. If you are going to include real people on the roster, you’re tethering that character to everything they’ve done, on and off the field. In a better world, these playstyles would have been linked to original characters who came with optional celebrity skins. But we don’t live in a better world, we live in a world where Cristiano Ronaldo is a canonical Fatal Fury character.
Edge Master Mode In The Streets Of South Town
In keeping with the times, Fatal Fury has attempted to reinforce its deeply satisfying gameplay with a more robust suite of single-player modes. The end result is a little mixed.
Episodes of South Town see you navigate a menu and engage in battles against different foes unique to this mode. Each battle brings a host of variables: one mission has you battling against an opponent with infinite super, another will challenge you to defeat an opponent who is invincible, but has a one in sixty chance of dying from any stray hit. At their best, some of these encounters feel a little like solving a puzzle, while others are great primers for teaching new mechanics. It can be pretty entertaining.
It is basically Fatal Fury’s take on the Edge Master mode first seen in Soul Blade. Thatshouldbe a good thing, but it all feels a little half-baked. The individual stories are trite, and for every novel mission you’ll play through, there’s a dozen encounters that just feel like more of the same. This isn’t to say that Episodes of South Town isn’t worth messing around with - I still had some fun with it - but it’s hard not to see it as an inferior version of something that Soul Blade nailed thirty years ago.
The color palette editing option, on the other hand, is an excellent addition. It allows for a fair degree of customization, even if you are just recolouring the character model.The ability to add different patterns to fabricsis a nice touch as well. I most certainly ended up putting more time into tweaking custom color schemes for my favorite characters than I did walking the streets of South Town, that’s for sure.
Add to that the option to fight in teams and the ability to utilize the classic Fatal Fury lane shift mechanic, and it becomes clear that City of the Wolves definitely manages to provide a rock-solid package. It’s just a shame that the marquee mode here is the weakest part of it.
At the time of release, there is only one stage that will allow you to utilize the Lane Shift mechanics. So, it is definitely more of a side-attraction. But it is still cool that they incorporated lanes at all.
Fatal Fury: City Of The Wolves is launching at the perfect time. The latest Tekken 8 patch has left fans distraught, we are months away from the next Street Fighter 6 character, and Mortal Kombat is face-down in a ditch. While the single-player experience is unlikely to wow casuals, the core gameplay is great and manages to thread the needle of being easy to pick up and play while also having a great deal of depth.
Ronaldo aside, the roster is fantastic, the game has a graphical style that pops, and the ability to edit color palettes allows for an excellent level of customization. Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves puts its best paw forward and proves that SNK still has what it takes to compete with the big dogs in the fighting game arena.
