Fatal Fury is finally back, and not with some cameo or as a guest fighter appearing in another game. No, Fatal Fury is back with it’s own game for the first time since the end of the 20th century, the Neo Geo still being a thing people played games on, and me being a six year old. At Summer Games Fest, we got to play Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves and its great to have this historic series return for the recent fighting game renaissance we’ve had.
The demo we got to play allowed us to play as five different characters with returning characters Terry Bogard, Rock Howard, and Marco Rodrigues as well as new characters Preecha and the newly announced at Summer Games Fest Vox Reaper. You can pick from three differnet styles for the characters SPG bars with Accel, Flux, and Final. You can also choose between Arcade and Smart styles to change up how combos and moves are done. Each character plays extremely well and felt great to control with responsive moves even on the fight sticks we played on. Combos aren’t too hard to to pull off and building your meters to pull off your special moves is actually incredibly fast. Fights feel like they fly by with how quickly you can pull off combos and moves. The fighting doesn’t feel heavy, but you can still feel the power behind the stronger hits.
The game itself looks almost straight out of a comic book with its stylized nature. Stages are equally strong in the art department. However, the random NPCs look like they move at 10 frames a second and look so basic compared to how much effort other fighting games put into their stage backgrounds.
Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves is set to release early next year. The game is being developed by some of the original Fatal Fury developers who are excited to finish what they started so long ago. Plus, many members of the development team are members of the Fighting Game Community. Thus, the game looks to be in good hands as it looks to finish development and get into the hands of fans who have been waiting almost my entire life to play a new game in the series again.
You can check out footage from the game below: