I’d tell you more about the Fatal Fury: City Of The Wolves beta if I hadn’t spent half my time waiting for a match

I have about seven hours logged in the beta for Fatal Fury: City of The Wolves, but I don’t feel much like I got seven hours of fighting in. It is of course the nature of these things to leave you wanting more, but on a weekend where I specifically set aside a lot of time for the game— I even skipped mahjong!— I don’t have the kind of tentative grasp on the game that I expected to have.

The first reason for this is the lack of an adequate training or tutorial mode. The second reason is the underwhelming state of the online play. Don’t worry, this game does have rollback… but there are other problems.

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A little background

But let’s get to the basics before we get into that. City of the Wolves is a sequel to the cult favorite 1999 Neo-Geo game Garou: Mark of the Wolves. Arguably the Fatal Fury series’ answer to the Street Fighter III reboot, Garou was an extremely high-quality work that wowed players with stunning animation, atmosphere, and the fan favorite new hero Rock Howard. And then it disappeared. Due to the whole company going bankrupt, SNK never completed the planned sequel that would resolve Garou’s cliffhanger ending, and fans have been begging for that game ever since.

Well, here it is. It just took 25 years, the revival of the King of Fighters series, and the revival of the Samurai Shodown series. The current step of the reconstruction of the Neo-Geo empire is the beautiful comic-shaded City of the Wolves.

SNK’s 3D games started to look good around the end of KOFXIV’s development cycle, and they finally delivered a completed, coherent aesthetic a few years back in the Samurai Shodown reboot. In City of the Wolves, they are going even more stylized than they have before. SNK’s anime-ish character designs meet a style distinctly influenced by American comics, with heavy inks and crosshatch shading, along with dots and other loud comic-style effects that will make old genre fans think of Marvel Vs. Capcom 3. It doesn’t take bleeding-edge graphics tech to look cool and unique: good, creative art is enough.

The basics

(Forgive me for not having great screens for this, there was no single-player in the beta and not a lot of chance to reach over my arcade stick for the screenshot button on my keyboard during online fights.)

Fatal Fury has been gone a really long time, but Terry Bogard and Rock Howard haven’t, so there’s been a push during the marketing to remind players that King of Fighters and Fatal Fury are two different things. Even in Street Fighter 6, Terry and Mai’s guest appearances are specifically, obsessively modeled after moves and animations from the old Fatal Fury series.

And that’s because Fatal Fury and KOF play very differently. KOF long ago settled into being the high-speed, high-mobility 2D fighting game with characters running and jumping across the screen at each other. But Fatal Fury, increasingly, became a game about big heavy guys hitting each other hard, and Garou even feels a bit like a Street Fighter.

City of the Wolves is a lot slower than KOF, and even a bit slower than Street Fighter 6. Characters move deliberately: there’s no crossing the stage in an instant, and even jumping in presents a pretty major risk. Attacks are big and heavy, giving players all the time in the world to confirm combos. At its core this is very classical 2D fighting, with players jockeying for position and trying to control space.

Revving it up

What’s unique is everything tied into the game’s Rev system, which turns the concept of super meter on its head. Rather than having a resource fill up to allow players to perform attacks, players are free to use enhanced (EX) special moves and other system features until the meter fills up, at which point they suffer a vulnerable overheat state similar to the one in Street Fighter 6. There are ways to “empty” the Rev gauge, but there’s effectively a finite amount of it you can expect to use in a round.

This encourages players to use resources and deal big combo damage right off the bat, and creates tension in the middle to end of the round as their options start to become limited and dangerous. You can even burn Rev meter while blocking to push an opponent off you, and space is valuable in a game like this. Traditional “super moves” exist, but the resource is extremely limited: you might use three level-1 supers for the entire match at maximum. As such, you’re extremely reliant on Rev for all but the absolute basics.

The TOP system from Garou returns and is now called SPG: you pick a part of the character’s life bar— full, middle, or bottom— during which they’ll be a bit powered up, get a strong armored attack, and unlock their biggest super move, the Hidden Gear. I found that for once, I wasn’t seeing the super-duper move over and over again in my matches, because it was legitimately rare for players to both have the super meters filled and notice that they were in SPG mode. It felt like an event when I landed one: though to be fair, Mai’s Hidden Gear is quite a production, involving a mid-battle costume change. That move really is an event.

Garou had some pretty unique concepts on defense that have evolved in the sequel. “Just Defense” is a parry-like mechanic that rewards players with a bit of health and Rev meter for blocking an attack at the moment it comes in. But the real benefit is the ability to cancel Just Defense into a special move, so clever players can come up with an instant counter to repetitive attack patterns. Nothing is quite “safe” with Just Defense in play, so players need to mix up their attack timing and rhythm as well as the moves they use.

Garou players got really good with JD in the previous game, so we can expect it to be a defining feature once players get more familiar with this one.

Another smaller feature I thought was really cool was how there are two specific attacks that either hop over low pokes or sneak under high ones. Time these right and you’ll see a slow-motion counter and get a combo opportunity. Even that good poke move isn’t necessarily safe, and a strong read can lead to a huge payoff.

Impressions

It took me some time to re-acclimate to City of the Wolves’ slower pace and positioning emphasis, coming immediately off Virtua Fighter, SF6, and Under-Night. Mai’s standing hard punch, a double fan strike, was so slow that I actually had trouble confirming combos at first. But the rhythms always come back sooner or later, and pretty soon I had settled in again.

I picked Mai for this beta and didn’t look back: what can I say, I loved her redesign, I already know how to play her (important, as this beta had no proper training mode!), Mai’s the best. This put me in a traditional, defensive play style, keeping opponents off with careful fan throws and slapping them out of the sky with her anti-air special. Mai’s been blessed with some strong long-range strikes to make up the distance, too. I didn’t really feel at a disadvantage playing a defensive style, the way I do in Street Fighter 6, due to this game’s more rounded systems.

It seemed to me that competitive-minded players were already rushing to Preecha, a new kickboxing character (Joe’s student) with crushing offense that doesn’t let defenders breathe, along with the combo ability to take half your life off any hit she does land. Almost all of the players I fought during the beta who beat the hell out of me were running Preecha. The very patient zoners went to Kain, who plays a pure run-away game with fireballs. I also ran into quite a few B.Jenets with advanced tech: stuff that circulated in promo videos on Youtube before the beta ever started.

My only actual gripe with the gameplay is that the feint input (hard kick + Rev button) is bizarre and I’d rather just have a sixth button than that.

I’m looking forward to getting more into the game, but…

Online woes

This is going to be much shorter than the gameplay section but it’s more important. SNK games have rollback now, but they don’t have good matchmaking yet. Good netcode is crucial, but in the rollback age we’re also seeing that matchmaking is equally important: the quality of the netcode doesn’t matter if the game can’t find you an opponent. City of the Wolves is unfortunately demonstrating this in the beta, basically repeating KOFXV’s troubled online interface and matchmaking.

(At the time, I was happy enough to have KOFXV with rollback, but after a month or so the sheer difficulty of getting a match, a few notches worse than this beta, turned me off playing the game at all. My fighting game standby all this time has been Granblue Versus.)

I can get really lost in online matches in fighting games because of the “one more game” feeling and the sheer speed with which you can start up a new fight. If the matches keep coming, you can play for hours without really noticing. Turning on ranked match in Street Fighter 6 is like turning on a firehose. By contrast, City of the Wolves’ online disrupts this flow with lots of waiting and awkward breaks.

I don’t know whether the game’s servers were overloaded or matchmaking criteria were very strict, but it frequently took 5-10 minutes to get a single match. It’s hard to believe there were that few players online during a free online beta, so something had to be wrong here. In any case, over beta weekend I would try and start the game up, get a few matches, and eventually give up when faced with an extra-long wait.

The actual in-game experience is great, but if the game’s having this much trouble finding me someone to fight during a free online beta that people are absolutely thirsty to play, then how is it going to go a month after the game comes out and most of the trend-chasing players are on to the next thing, or back to Street Fighter?

There’s been a pretty loud player response to the subpar online experience, so I do suspect SNK will do something about it. Whether that will fix anything remains to be seen.

Training mode

Finally, there was no training mode in the beta, coupled with a poor tutorial that fails to explain any of the game’s systems adequately. Simply asking a player to follow a button prompt to execute a move doesn’t mean you’ve taught them anything, and so it is here as Terry runs Rock down a move list. Hey Rock, press back! Hey Rock, press these two buttons! Nice job, Rock! SNK has long had these kind of non-tutorials, and they aren’t great.

City of the Wolves is so systems-heavy that it’s kind of overwhelming at first. And sure, a fighting game online beta is just to test the online play, but this beta still throws players in too deep without a rope. I understand the idea of not wanting players to lab out everything in the game in three days without even buying it— because they will— but no access to training with a dummy at all means that even figuring out the basics becomes a trial-by-fire, like the old arcade days.

At least the ability to sit in training while you wait for a match, like so many other fighting games, would have been nice.

Overall

My opinion is pretty much in line with that of the rest of the community on this one: I had a great time playing City of the Wolves over the weekend and I’m looking forward to the completed game, but whether I buy it on launch or wait until it’s on sale depends entirely upon whether or not this online matchmaking experience improves.

It is difficult to justify buying in when I already had a similar experience with King of Fighters XV. No matter how much I liked that game, getting a match was difficult even when it was new. I wanted to get into it, but I never even really settled on a team, because once I was finally done practicing out three characters, I would go online and find it truly difficult to get a match. Eventually I gave up, just because the matchmaking was so bad. You can say “it’s just interface”, but it really goes a long way. The games that do it best are the ones that are going to stick around.