Fatal Fury's Unapproachable Beta

2 March 2025

If you keep up with fighting games at all, you probably knew about the Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves beta that finished up last weekend. I’ve been excited for this one, having only ever dabbled with King of Fighters, Garou: Mark of the Wolves is easily my favourite of SNK’s fighters. A full-on sequel twenty-six years later is pretty wild.

My excitement was generally backed up by streamers and youtubers who played it, “this one’s going to be good” is absolutely a common sentiment. SNK, have also clearly stepped things up in the visuals department, no doubt helped by the fact that they’re ninety-six percent owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, but don’t worry, that has zero effect on the company and definitely isn’t political. 🙄

The point is, I was looking forward to this beta, and was extremely surprised by what I played.

To start with, let me get the good out of the way.

• I do like how the core game plays. I’m not talking about balance or anything, just the act of mashing buttons and watching moves was good.

That’s about all I’ve got for the positives, and even that took a little bit of time. My initial impression was that the game felt clunky, some might say heavy but that feels too nice for me. Coming off Street Fighter Six, it certainly felt old in comparison. Only feeling out the sort of the rhythm required after an extended session with friends. I still think it’s clunky, but in a mechanical way that felt consistent.

So now the criticism. Genuinely. What the hell were SNK thinking with this UI? It managed to hit every single UX no-no in the book.

• Confusing to navigate. With many options nested under other options, which in turn where nested under other options.
• Non-responsive. Pressing a button, and not getting feedback for what felt like an age. Accessing the online menu seemed to check with the server before responding, which occasionally resulted in literal second plus long delays between pressing confirm on a button, and seeing the menu change state. Multiple times I would try to access the online menu, think the game hadn’t picked up my button press, press it again and then have it suddenly go two menus deep. Something you wanted to avoid because of the next point.
• Extended load screens. Not since the days of Fable Three deciding to make their pause screen a fully interactable room, complete with butler, have I seen menus that fade to black and back so often and for so long. Want to change character before you jump on ranked play? No problem, that’s under Online Battle Settings, but to see that screen you’ll have to go through multiple fade to blacks to get there and back. It’s the sort of issue that isn’t awful in isolation, but I’m talking about menus here, this kind of delay starts to feel unbearable. You find yourself thinking, “What are they even loading? Did they just decide to add a fade to black here?”

These load screens are in issue outside of menus too, they appear between rounds, matches and when you reset a training room. It never feels as fast or fluid as you want it to. If there’s one thing I hope they fix between now and launch, it’s this.

It’s such a confusing state for a beta to be in, especially knowing that generally a beta equals demo for most players. No doubt there are people with a passing interest in the game, maybe they play another fighting game and want to check it out. They boot up the beta, only a couple of months out from launch, and so expect it to be indicative of the launch experience; regardless of whether SNK pop up a warning stating the exact opposite is true. What’s the first-time experience here? A “tutorial”, which demonstrates a handful of the games many mechanics one time, with a single character out of the eight playable, followed by three online play modes, Ranked, Casual and Room Matches.

Speaking of the tutorial. Wow, it’s incredibly bad, not only does it not teach you all the systems of the game, but it does a bad job of the ones it does. I personally didn’t realise the single combo they taught me was a universal combo that worked on all characters until much later! I don’t want to give the impression that the tutorial was bad because it didn’t teach enough though, don’t worry it still throws an overwhelming amount of systems at you, it’s specifically that each is not given the time or instruction required. What you get is one poorly written line, one correct attempt, and then you move on.

In any other fighter, you would hit the training mode, just for a few minutes to get a feel for movement etc. but that’s not an option here. SNK decided not to include one. I’ve seen people theorise that this was to stop hackers from cracking the game and letting pros practice offline for months before the launch; but that clearly wasn’t the case since data miners have found literally everything in the game files. All the story modes images, references for all remaining characters to be announced, as well as the next three seasons of DLC, all the stages in the game, the theme they've been holding back as a marketing beat and oh, a whole training mode. Adjusting a single memory value using cheat engine reveals it was there and ready the whole time. Wild stuff.

But fine, you’re willing to overlook the lack of training, lets jump in ranked and learn there. First you have to have your initial rank determined by playing three CPU battles. As far as I could tell these were totally random in character choice, and difficulty. How SNK could determine rank based off this I do not know. I managed to win one of my three matches and was placed in B-V. I proceed to get my ass kicked for the next four games, it’s not even close. This is a terrible first impression. I’m not going to say I’m incredible at fighting games, in fact the furthest I’ll ever go is a mere “I’m OK”, but I mean, I’ve got half the cast at Master in Street Fighter and it’s a genre I actively play. If someone’s new to fighters, and curious about the upcoming and much advertised City of the Wolves, well... they’re probably not going to be interested in for long.

What a baffling beta, a terrible first foot forward outside of the pros who could really utilise the systems in a way the average player can’t. I do think this game’s going to have some cool and exciting pro matches, but in terms of keeping a casual player base, the kind that you want for match making consistency and general interest, I think it’s going to flop it.

I could go on and on, but some bullet points will be more than enough to get my feelings across:

• Unified rank, instead of on a per character rank. At worst you’re punished for trying new characters, and at best you lose out on a reason to climb the ladder. E.g. I want to get everyone to Master like in Street Fighter.
• Ranks are boring. No one wants to say they’re “Rank B-IV”. You’re telling me there isn’t a “Hungry Wolf” rank!?
• Haven’t got to see the single-player content, but I’m having doubts imagining it’ll be particularly fun to navigate considering the current UX issue.
• No mouse support. I didn’t even mention this when talking about UX, but Room Matches default to a fake virtual cursor, that doesn’t work with your mouse on PC. It’s baffling.
• I thought that the SFX and VFX were generally lacking. Leaving a lot of the action feeling quite limp. The exception to this is the punish counter, which feels real nice to land.
• Every Super looks so fucking boring. It’s criminal how dull each hidden gear is, especially considering it’s a characters most powerful move and can only be activated under specific limited circumstances. Watch these character trailers and marvel at how many of them end in tornados. Just as a fun aside, take a look at the behind the scenes of just lighting a Super for Street Fighter.
• Backgrounds all animate at thirty frames per second. This is insane. There is a train level that is straight up unplayable for me. Most other stages were either static or had minimal movement in a way that didn’t hurt my eyes.
• On a related note, no random stages. I assume this’ll be coming at launch, but unless they let you flag stages as random, I can’t possibly use it in case the train level comes up.
• The matchmaking times were atrocious, on the first day there were seven thousand plus players, it shouldn’t be taking five plus minutes to find a match.
• If you don’t have the knowledge to counter a system, then you’re going to lose. This feels like an obvious thing to say, as it’s true for all fighters, but it feels extra abusable here. S.P.G., a power boost that is only active while your health is within one of three pre-determined ranges, feels tailored made to be broken, as it gives access to one of the strongest mechanics, the Rev Blow. This is a one hundred percent strike invincible move, that comes out extremely quickly, hits extremely hard and can easily be spammed. If the opponent is also in S.P.G. they can counter with their own Rev Blow, but if they’re not, their options narrow to throwing or super moves, both significantly hard to use depending on skill level and resources. Not to mention that an added bonus to S.P.G. is that you can chain a massive amount of your characters hardest hitting attacks for what feels like free. The potential to massively outplay someone is enormous.

Anyway, yeah. This one’s a bit of a rant. I’m not particularly invested in the success of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, which is hilarious to write after typing everything above, but I was genuinely staggered at the state of the beta. It’s not a reach to imagine a bad beta staining a games reputation, requiring an absurd amount of effort and time to fix, if it’s fixable at all.

This is exactly what I think is going to happen, if these issues don’t get ironed out by launch, and in my opinion they won’t. What I imagine will be a large initial player base will quickly shrink, leaving the hardcore who will scare off the prospective players quickly. I hoped this had the potential to be more of a Guilty Gear Strive, and less of a Virtua Fighter Five R.E.V.O.

Oh well, time will tell! 🤷