Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves review: South Town showdown

City of the Wolves is a sequel more than 25 years in the making, but is this the triumphant return of 1v1 Fatal Fury fighting?

Garou: Mark of the Wolves came out in 1999. Now, it’s not like SNK fans have been starved to see their favorite characters. Terry Bogard and the Fatal Fury crew have shown up in plenty of King of Fighters games, and even crossed over to other franchises like (most recently) Street Fighter 6. What warrants a vanilla Fatal Fury game in 2025’s fighting landscape is just SNK staple fighting in a nicely-distilled form that should be easy for most to grasp and enjoyable for longtime fans to master. It’s a lot of what I’ve been waiting on for decades… Or it would be if some strange decisions didn’t feel like they obviously affected the overall characters, fighting, and modes.

Some time has passed…

Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves is meant to be a direct sequel to the events of Garou: Mark of the Wolves, based heavily on Rock Howard and Terry Bogard’s endings in that game. Rock went to train with his uncle Kain in order to learn more about the Howard heritage and his power. Terry went back to wandering, confident in Rock’s decisions, and years passed as many of the characters grew up a bit. Now, a mysterious force has put the Howard inheritance on the line for a new King of Fighters tournament. Rock, Terry, Kain, and many of our favorites came back to participate alongside a few new faces that are neat… Save one, but we’ll get there.

The mix of old and new characters in City of the Wolves is good. Terry, Rock, Mai, and many Garou staples such as Tizoc, B. Jenet, Kevin, Marco, and Dong Hwan are here, and they look cool. Characters like Hokutomaru and Gato have even been aged up a bit to mark the passage of time, and they look pretty good in the game’s art style. In the Arcade Mode’s presentation, match character intros, super moves, and outros, the characters have a striking comic book look and framing that’s fun to see in action. They all look like pretty good upgrades of themselves. Meanwhile, all-new characters like Preecha and Vox bring solid new aesthetics to the game, with Preecha being a student of kickboxer Joe Higashi and sharing many of his moves while Vox is somehow related to Garou sub-boss Grant. The lore and nods are oozing out of every corner of the game and feel fun to comb through for a longtime SNK fan.

The exception to most of this is Ronaldo. Cristiano Ronaldo and Salvatore Ganacci were late guest celebrity additions to City of the Wolves’ base roster and felt like weird inclusions to begin with. I’ve come around on Ganacci. He worked with SNK on bringing original music to the game, and his character is silly. He was “trained by Duck King” and has all sorts of animations inspired by his music and videos. He fits into SNK’s mold and feels like he was involved in helping his character come to life in the game.

On the flipside, everything in City of the Wolves involving Ronaldo feels like SNK was working around him and not with him. He doesn’t look like Ronaldo, and despite him having a kind of interesting and maybe even overtooled fighting style, he feels far more like a marketing decision than a passionate fan being in the game. It’s disappointing he takes up a base roster slot when characters like Jae Hoon, Freeman, Blue Mary, Yamazaki, and other options were available. Putting that aside, Ronaldo doesn’t break the game, and the rest of the cast and presentation are great, but make no mistake. This blatantly stinks of executive decisions and meddling.

That said, the fighting in this game with these characters feels great. The REV and SPG systems work well to give players boosts of power at the cost of building up a meter that could leave you in a weakened spot if you use your best stuff nonstop. It encourages a solid tug of war of defense and aggression as you work to try to keep your REV meter down while still find the openings on your opponent. Will you use all your stuff to take out 30 percent of their health bar, or hold off on that full combo to save some meter for another opportunity? Those were decisions I constantly found myself making and I liked that. There are parts of it, like REV Blows during SPG, that feel too carbon-copy close to Street Fighter 6’s Drive systems, but it’s not so samey that it feels cheap or wrong. Plus, the characters here are fun enough to play that I constantly found myself moving between the roster as I saw something cool on a fighter I wasn't playing. It’s not often I want to fiddle with so much of a roster.

REV it up

Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves goes out of its way to deliver a wide variety of ways to play it, and many of them are good, though some feel a bit more half-baked than others. Arcade Mode is pretty great in this game. Every character has a unique introduction to their Arcade Mode run, every fight has an intro based on the opposing fighter, and there are proper rivalry battles and challenging bosses at the end. It feels like one of the best Arcade Modes I’ve seen in a while, and you can challenge yourself with several levels of difficulty that feel engaging the higher you go. By the way, you can’t play as Ronaldo there (yet).

Episodes of South Town is the de facto story mode of City of the Wolves and, quite frankly, I wanted more. In this mode, you pick a character and “run around South Town” picking fights and pursuing a narrative story for your character. I put those quotes there because it’s really just looking at a map and picking destination objectives that take you to the next text box story beat or fight. This mode is filled to the brim with fights against generic characters that level up your character and help you do more damage. I should be happy to get more lore, but it plays like a checklist of me bumping off countless generic bozos before I get to a story fight with an actual character in the game. It’s fine. Just kind of boring and nothing flashy there. By the way, you also can’t play as Ronaldo there (yet).

On the flip side, the Color Edit and Juke Box modes feel like a place for players to spend all sorts of time. I fell in love with Juke Box mode the second I got in there. I really like a lot of City of the Wolves’ original tracks, but how could I not gush seeing that this game has every single soundtrack from all of the Fatal Fury games, plus some King of Fighters tracks, Art of Fighting soundtracks, and the original Garou’s soundtrack? You can build a custom playlist and even attach any song to any character or stage you want. It’s easy to port your musical choices into the game’s other modes, too. It didn’t take too much work to set it up so I was fighting against Vox with Yamazaki’s C62 Shirokuni track from Fatal Fury 3 running in the background. There are also tracks from the original Garou I prefer, like Dong Hwan’s Loose Genius, so I mixed and matched as I felt fit. I love the options and application of them here. Couldn't help but notice a certain someone doesn't have an original song.

Color Edit is truly impeccable. There are preset colors, a color gradient picker, and even a selection of about 30 patterns with seven colors each to choose from. Once you pick a character to edit, you get a unique variety of options to adjust to any piece of clothing, prop, or accessory on the character of your liking. For Tizoc, I got to adjust his Griffon Mask (ha), beak, gloves, tights, and boots colors. For Billy, I got to play with his sunglasses, hair (base color, beard, and highlights), outer jacket, undershirt, gloves, boots, bo staff, and pants. Obviously, the amount of options depends on the character you have, but it’s got a lot of options to get to your ideal look with your character and I can’t wait to see what people do with that. Guess whose colors you can’t edit (yet)?

Online Modes are both impeccable in function and a little unwieldy in navigation. There are is Ranked matchmaking, casual matches, room creation, and search modes. Unfortunately, it’s also the kind of game that makes you pick your character and stage decisions before any matches begin, so you have to do all of that stuff out of match, which I’m not crazy about. Navigating through rooms and adjusting options is also a bit annoying. The UI just isn’t all that user friendly, and even when you get past the learning curve it feels clunky.

That runs in complete contrast to the impeccable quality of matches. During my time in review, I was able to play in the Dallas, Texas region with players from New York and England. There was nary even a bit of lag or glitching as we played a lengthy amount of sets. The online and crossplay in this thing feel airtight and ready to go.

A dream fight with just a splotch of “hmm”

I have been waiting most of my life for much of what this game brings to the table. It’s a solid-feeling fighting game in one of my favorite series with good offensive and defensive options, a great starting cast that promises even more in the years ahead, a mostly good variety of modes, solid music (and the availability of classic tracks), a fun comicbookish animation style, and an editor to adjust character looks to your liking. That said, it’s not like this is perfect by any stretch. I kind of wish the last two months of news for this game hadn’t happened, because one of the results is shoddy and problematic (not Ganacci. He can stay). That paired with a checklist story mode and a somewhat unintuitive online UI keep this from being my ultimate fighting dream come true. Even so, if you've been waiting on a good new Fatal Fury game, it's here, pure and simple, and if that's all you care about, then City of the Wolves delivers.

This review is based on a digital PlayStation 5 copy given by the publisher. Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves comes to PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on April 24, 2025, with early access for premium digital pre-orders beginning on April 21.

Review for
Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves
8
Pros

• Most of the roster is great and plays well, even Salvatore
• Solid and expressive art style
• Great original music & the collected music from the whole series
• Arcade Mode feels better than many others we've played
• Solid modes for training and onboarding
• REV and SPG encourage good defensive & offensive decisions
• Online play and crossplay are exceptionally smooth in most cases
• An awesome Color Edit mode

Cons

• Episodes of South Town is a ho-hum story mode
• Online mode UI feels clunky and unintuitive
• Cristiano Ronaldo