FATAL FURY: City of the Wolves

FATAL FURY: City of the Wolves was provided by the SNK CORPORATION for review. Thank you!

FATAL FURY is back for the first time in the 21st century! City of the Wolves brings back old favorites to our screens in a brand new style, and hopes to be the beginning of reviving the franchise. We're practically inundated with fighting games, with the likes of TEKKEN 8, Street Fighter 6, and Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. all releasing relatively near each other.

While gameplay-wise, it can be pretty hard to distinguish your fighting game from others, there have been plenty of attempts over the years to introduce new game modes to these games to create unique experiences. FATAL FURY: City of the Wolves' attempt is to include a single-player "RPG" mode, known as "Episodes of South Town" or EOST.

EOST allows you to play through various stories, each focused on the character of your choosing, exploring their backgrounds. The story portion of EOST is presented in a visual novel fashion, text-heavy with no voice acting, which is a bit of a shame, but it's still pretty neat. Between the story scenes, you'll be navigating a world map and choosing fights/quests depending on your level to gain strength and progress the storyline.

Is it revolutionary? Not really. But if you are a FATAL FURY fan, then I could see this being a great mode to sink some time into, as it helps you learn more about your favorite characters and see more interactions between them. Each story isn't too long, but most of the characters have their storylines, and there are a good few hours that you can sink into just this mode.

While it is mostly battle-after-battle, it does add some variety to the gameplay and is a better sense of progression than the "classic" style of just playing through a few battles with each character to finish their story. Such a mode is also available in City of the Wolves, known as the "Arcade" mode.

Calling it an "RPG" as SNK does might be a little generous. You can level up, which boosts your stats, but there aren't really choices to be made, and it's very much more in the vein of a Visual Novel between fights.

The game also has online matches, which, unfortunately, I wasn't able to partake in prior to release. There is matchmaking, as well as the ability to make custom lobbies with your own settings, including more than two players in a lobby.

As for the fighting itself, that's where FATAL FURY: City of the Wolves doesn't stand out. It's pretty similar to other games in the genre, with some minor systems here and there that can feel different. However, the EOST story mode is definitely the draw here, and, fortunately, it's a good draw.

That being said, the fighting is solid. You can mix and match your face buttons with directional inputs to pull off a large variety of moves, and you can combine multiple presses at once to add even more moves. It's nothing new, but they don't skimp out by simplifying the combat; there's enough depth and variety here for the skill ceiling to be high, and for people who don't know what they're doing to be decimated by someone with skill.

You also have a feature known as the SPG, essentially a mechanic where you are stronger depending on your current health. This adds an element of strategy, as you get to choose where the SPG kicks in before the match. You could have it so you are stronger when you are between 80-100% of your max health, hoping to gain the upper hand early on and avoid damage. Or perhaps between 0-20%, to give yourself the best chance of a comeback.

Generally, I kept my SPG at 80-100% of health and bargained on my being able to deal critical damage to my opponent before I dropped below 80% of my health, meaning even though I was weaker for the end of the battle, my opponent was already on their last legs.

Another acronym to keep your eye on is your REV meter. Essentially, you'll be able to pull off some cool and powerful moves, both offensive and defensive, but doing so will raise your REV meter. Use those moves too much and you'll max out your REV meter; then you're going to be in a tough situation, with some of your moves being disabled.

It's all quite a bit to keep track of. I often found myself forgetting about the REV meter at the bottom left corner of the screen when fighting, but if you really want to excel and be competitive, it is something you need to manage during a fight.

The visual style of the game leans very much on the anime/cartoonish side of things, and I'm not sure I'm 100% sold on it. It looks decent for most of the game, but when you get close-ups of the characters, particularly the after-battle scenes, some of the texture work and materials can look a little blurry or fuzzy, like they're made of fabric or that there's a strange "comic-book" filter on the screen.

FATAL FURY: City of the Wolves - Steam Deck Performance

City of the Wolves doesn't support 16:10 resolutions, so we are stuck with some black bars along the top and bottom of the screen, but we do have great controller support.

There are also issues with the in-game videos, so it is recommended that you use Proton GE 9-27 (or the newest Proton GE) to enjoy story cutscenes. You can see how to install Proton GE here.

By default, the game is set to the lowest settings, and dynamic resolution is turned on. You can tweak these settings slightly, which I did by disabling the dynamic resolution, upping Texture Quality to Medium, and enabling "Lighting Effects," which helps the stages look better. It's important to ensure we don't get frame drops in a fighting game, especially in online play, so I didn't push it too hard.

I didn't notice a single frame drop in play when running these settings. It was a solid 60 FPS throughout, playing on every stage in the game with various characters, so you can be confident you'll get a good playing experience here.

The power draw was around the 13W-16W range, so we can expect around 3.5 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck OLED and around 2.5 hours from a Steam Deck LCD. Temperatures generally stayed around 60 °C, so it's not too bad either.

Accessibility:

There aren't many Accessibility options in City of the Wolves. There is a profanity filter for online matches, and you can adjust basically every aspect of the audio levels, disable screen shaking, add a background to subtitles, and adjust key binds, but that's about it.

Conclusion:

FATAL FURY: City of the Wolves is a competent fighting game; the mechanics won't win any awards, but they are still very solid and make for a more than competent experience. The standout here is the EOST Story Mode, which, after a long break from these characters, is good to get to know them again in a somewhat visual novel fashion, interspersed with plenty of fights and a decent progression system.

Steam Deck performance is pretty good, too. We can't have much in the way of visual niceties, but we can at least expect a solid 60 FPS experience, so we're not at a disadvantage.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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