Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves Review

The newest SNK fighting game Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves is finally here! Announced outta nowhere, this is a sequel to the fighting game fan favorite Garou: Mark of the Wolves and it is fully set in the Fatal Fury universe. It features the main character Rock Howard and his adoptive father Terry Bogart, on a new quest to find and rescue Rock’s mother from the clutches of an old enemy: Mr Big. Of course, in true fighting game fashion, our hero can only do that by entering a tournament, beating people up and finally facing out a final boss.

When I first saw the reveal trailer, I was very impressed by the game’s presentation, especially since I like SNKs characters and choice of story. It was one of the most anticipated games of 2025 for me and I was eager to play it. However, the unexpected announcement of world renown football player Cristiano Ronaldo and real life DJ Salvatore Ganacci as members of the fighting game roster took me by absolute surprise and severely soured my mood for this game – real life characters have no place in a fighting game with anime-like superpowers. However, because of a friends’ interest and my passion for fighting games, I ended up purchasing this game regardless. I was surprised to discover that City of the Wolves is actually a very solid fighting game which can find its fanbase quite quickly.

The gameplay of this fighting game can be really confusing in the beginning, just to eventually realize that it’s simpler than it looks and it’s one of the few games where you should somewhat ignore the tutorial… CotW is a 1v1 fighter, with traditional punches and kicks and super attacks like fireballs or gravity defying punches – basically all you could find in a classic fighting game like Street Fighter.
What is unique to this game is the so-called REV System. On your health bar you have a special gold segment called SPG. When your health is in that gold area, you can perform additional inputs and combos that aren’t normally possible outside of SPG mode. This is similar to Max Mode from King of Fighters or the V-trigger system from Street Fighter V. You also unlock special attacks unique to this SPG mode. The SPG area can be placed either on the first third of your health bar, in the middle or at the end.

Another unique mechanic is the Overheating system. As you block or use REV attacks, a small bar will slowly fill. Once it’s filled, you will get the OVERHEAT!! message and you will not be able to use your REV attacks anymore.

All these systems can be really overwhelming at first. As mentioned, the tutorial really doesn’t do a good job with explaining all these mechanics, other than providing you a wall of text and some challenges. In my honest opinion, the best way to understand how these mechanics work is to jump straight into a training mode or any of the other modes that the game offers and discover everything as you go.

Fortunately, CotW is a fully developed fighting game that is eager to show its worth. You have a multitude of modes available to you, easily accessible for experienced and new players.

The first mode you will want to hit is Practice Mode. Despite its shoddy tutorial, you will at least get a grasp of how this game works. You can then try your moves in Training Mode or simply jump into Missions Mode and explore each character’s trials. The trials are easy and the taught combos not very optimal, but you will get a good idea of what moves the characters have at their disposal.

There’s two more challenges there, Time Attack Mode and Survival Mode, for those more ambitious. Time Attack is nothing special, however Survival Mode is the hardest challenge in the game. It asks you to defeat 100 enemies in a row, of increasing difficulty.

Once you get accustomed with the controls, it’s recommended to either hit Arcade Mode to get into the story a bit, or directly practice against the CPU in Versus Mode. These are classic modes, with Arcade Mode revealing every character’s story and involvement in the events of CotW (except Cristiano Ronaldo, because yeah… he’s not even properly integrated in the game).

However, the true meat and potatoes of the game are in Online Mode. This is the place where you directly face other real players, either in Ranked Mode where you compete for points, or Casual Matches where you simply play for fun. You can even create Room Matches and invite your friends to battle against you.
Moreover, you can edit your profile, watch replies, check your position on the leaderboards or create a clone of yourself who emulates your behavior and allows you to check for gaps in your strategy. It’s not a perfect system but it’s decent enough and can certainly be helpful.

That being said… in true SNK fashion, Online Mode is crazy unstable. You can get random disconnects, screen freezes or lag spikes, although I’d say they’re not as bad as in their other titles. SNK Online Mode is always a gamble at launch but fortunately, patches are being released even at the moment of writing this review, so I would expect the issues to be fixed in the foreseeable future.

Old fans of the franchise can also have their dose of nostalgia by visiting the Gallery and the Jukebox present in the game. The Gallery has all the movies and the artwork of the game, while the Jukebox allows you to select any tracks you want from the series, including from the old Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting games. Believe it or not, the Jukebox option is actually very important for old fans of a fighting game series, so this addition is a nice touch from SNK.

Finally, there is a unique addition to the game called Episodes of South Town. Here, each character has a specific “side story” that fleshes out their personality. From a lore standpoint, I’d say that this mode is an absolute treat to play, especially considering characters like Billy Kane, who easily became my favorite character in this game, mainly because of how the developers decide to approach his story.

Unfortunately, this mode doesn’t offer any long-term enjoyment besides the lore tidbits. It’s mainly a glorified string of NPC fighting, where your character levels up just so they can fight tougher and tougher opponents. While I praised Billy, most of the other characters have uninteresting stories, so I mostly skipped all of the dialogue once I lost interest.

For those who like to get all of a game’s trophies / achievements, the list for this game is unusually challenging! Lately, fighting games have had rather easy completions, and so CotW has actually taken me by surprise with its difficulty. While the list has a lot of easy trophies, like winning 10 online matches or editing your character, there’s three trophies that will probably give quite a few headaches to players that have grown used to the recent easy fighting game trophy lists.

First the trials, while not as difficult as old King of Fighters games, they still can pose a decent challenge. You have to complete 120 of the 136 available trials. Each character has eight trials and usually the Arcade Trial 5 and Smart Trial 3 are the most challenging of the bunch. Fortunately there’s a bit of breathing room so with a bit of perseverance, they can be completed in no time.

Another tricky trophy is Begone, Weakling!, where you have to defeat the “strongest enemy” in Arcade Mode. What the game doesn’t tell you is that you have to finish Arcade Mode on the hardest difficulty without rematching once. This proved to be quite a daunting challenge, until I discovered a really easy combo with Billy Kane: by zoning and spamming the Circle, or the autocombo button in Smart Mode (the game’s “easy to play” system), Billy does a half screen combo that inflicts a reasonable amount of damage while also being in a safe position. All you have to do is mind your positioning and not let the CPU get too close to you.

Finally, the biggest challenge this game throws at you is beating Survival Mode, where you have to defeat a string of 100 opponents, their difficulty increasing the more opponents you defeat. You can recover the damage you take between rounds, but it’s only around a 15-20% health recovery, so you really do not want to take too much damage.
This proves to be the true platinum breaker. While the first 60 opponents are rather easy to defeat, at higher tiers the CPU goes absolutely ballistic. It will constantly read your inputs, block every move you throw at it and do the most optimal combo ever to inflict as much damage as possible. If it wasn’t enough, from stage 85 onwards the CPU gets infinite SPG meter, which means that it can pull super REV attacks at any time with no fear of running out of SPG meter. You literally can lose your entire health bar just from a mistimed input.

Billy Kane is once again the best character to use in this situation, however it’s a bit more complex than in Arcade Mode, since the CPU in Survival Mode is even more difficult. You have to learn spacing, what each character does, how to punish in the most effective way and most importantly, how to manage the REV and Overheating system. Billy Kane is one of the few character that has the best performance while in an Overheat state, but you really want to be far away from the opponent.

For those interested, I have written a miniguide over at PSNProfiles, and below is a recording of my successful clear of Survival Mode. I only recorded from match 60 onwards, because the first 60 matches are basically a one-button spam. Having to go through this many brain-off fights during any attempt at Survival Mode really starts to wear one down, which is another reason why this trophy is this hard to achieve.

Unfortunately, not all is green in the City of the Wolves.

I mentioned at the beginning of this review that I have an issue with this game. A rather nasty issue, that appeared out of nowhere. And I know that many people shared this sentiment at least after the initial announcement of the guest character: Cristiano Ronaldo, the football player, and Salvadore Ganacci, an EDM DJ that is probably not too well known.

There have been weird guest characters in fighting games before, but a straight out real person simply doesn’t work in a character roster – see LeBron James in the latest Multiversus game. In my honest opinion, the addition of real life personalities utterly breaks the immersion. How can you tell me that Cristiano Ronaldo is capable of defeating an anime character with only his football?

Now granted, after checking in more detail, at least Salvatore Ganacci is a made-up persona of the DJ, he is this weird tracksuit guy in all his clips. I would say that he barely fits in the game, mainly because the real person is very invested in this game and the character itself is hilarious as hell to play as, to the point where he has quickly become a fan favorite. Made up personas I’d say are fine if they are done well, but Cristiano sticks out like a sore thumb. Unlike Salvatore, he doesn’t fit in the game – he has no Arcade Mode or Episodes of Southtown.

Allegedly, these characters were added because the newest owner of SNK is a fan of both these personalities. Unfortunately, this sets out a not-so-fun precedent. While the owner can add whatever character he wants, I doubt fans of a series would like having situations where Tom Cruise has to fight out Goku. This ruins the entire mood of the game.

Despite its obtuse tutorial and odd character inclusion, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves is still an incredibly fun game. SNK put in an incredible amount of work into this game and it’s a decent fighting game pick, both for newcomers and old fans of the series. Plus, there’s even more characters announced to come at a later time, including Street Fighter characters, which hints at a possible future collaboration between Capcom and SNK – something that always resulted in amazing games in the past.