Fatal Fury City of Wolves Beta Impressions

Image credits: PR TIMES

Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves' open beta test has been underway for almost two days, and players are getting to try a brand new title for the first time. The impressions will be focused mostly on the online netcode, matchmaking, overall gameplay experience, presentation, and things like menus and interfaces. A deeper impressions piece on the multitude of mechanics, systems, and characters shall arrive in the coming days. Overall, Fatal Fury looks and feels much more polished than it did a year ago, though the game isn't all flawless and perfect either.

There have been consistent reports of matchmaking issues abound in the COTW beta, but luckily, some players have seemingly managed to dodge most of them. The game runs and looks great on all systems, even the PS4 for the most part. There is noticeable screen tearing on the PS4, which is mostly relegated to character intros, and this apparent lack of VSync has apparently helped the game's input lag on the last generation hardware too. The biggest difference seemed to be wired and wireless connections with Fatal Fury getting spotty when it comes to Wi-Fi players, which is sort of the nature of the beast.

The gameplay feels pretty great for the most part, being frenetic but not frantic in nature. There's a lot you can do at any given time that can leave you frozen with options. This isn't helped by the lack of a Training mode, which is probably the biggest gripe of all. The only other problems seen were inconsistently long load times between rounds sometimes and texture loading mostly on PS4. Matches do tend to also slow down when someone is in S.P.G. since REV Blow is very strong in this beta since it can be hard to figure out good ways to counter it without a Training Mode.

Some players have seen complaints about the netcode as well, however, pretty much all of their matches have been great to playable even under one to two bar conditions. It's not as good as the gold standard that is Street Fighter 6 now, but players were able to play with others from the Midwest to Sweden and have it be pretty solid with a few hitches. The quality isn't amazing with that level of connection disparity, but it's also been arguably playable in basically every match. To push it even further, some players even set up some matches against friends all the way over in Australia and while they'd hesitate to call their matches "good", they'd actually go as far as to say "playable" given the distance.

The first open beta test of "FATAL FURY: CotW" was held from Thursday, February 20 to Tuesday, February 25, 2025, to improve the quality of network functions. In addition to the boss character "Cain R. Heinlein" from the previous "FATAL FURY MARK OF THE WOLVES," eight other characters will be playable for the first time, including "B. Jenny. The game is free for PlayStation Plus, Xbox Game Pass Core and Ultimate subscribers, so players should join. The latest title in the FATAL FURY series features a unique "Art Style" that stimulates the senses, a "REV System" that accelerates the excitement of battles, and two control styles that can be enjoyed by beginners and experts alike, with a promising gameplay experience.