Let me start this off by saying I am not the most pro centric fighting game player. I know moves, and combos, and tech, but I don't lab enough. I usually play those games to escape. I've entered one tournament, and got demolished. With that being said, and hopefully understood, this preview is from a casual perspective, and from a casual perspective, this game may not be for us. Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves is finishing up on their first beta, at the time of this posting.
The beta came with a full online mode. This consisted of ranked and casual matches, and with the ability to create rooms. The tutorial is only for Rock Howard, and you learn all the basics, and techniques with him. Naturally, a lot of the online rankings were him, with a couple of Vox, and Kain sprinkled here and there. There is no training mode, but that stopped absolutely no one from cracking the game wide open. With a free cross play, and people owning more than one platform, it was easy to create a room, and practice your face off. I didn't do that, let's move on.
Fatal Fury hasn't released a stand alone game in 28 years, so when City of the Wolves was announced, fighting game fans were interested. When they knew they were getting a beta, they were more interested, only to find out a couple of things didn't tickle their Reppuken. The rollback netcode was ok for the beta, and I'm sure there will be another, for the constant pauses between matches, and the matchmaking taking a while. There's another worry, and this is for us casuals.
This game, once people got the hang of it, saw me take a 16 hit 60% life bar reduction, with very little resources used. The rev up system is used for EX moves, and if you used those moves too much, you overheat. It's not wise to be over heated, but that doesn't stop you from smacking people around KOF XV style. SPG is also a major problem in this game, as you get even more added to your repertoire. This game is in beta though, so I want to save all my metrics and thoughts until the full release is in our hands.
Right now, though, this one may be for the pros. And not even the people who are intermediate at these games I think will stand a chance. I wavered back and forth on this, championing the speed of the game, and the movement, which is still faster than Mortal Kombat 1. It still feels very KOFXV, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the damage needs scaled badly. Also, stay out of the corner. It's not safe. And Ken, when he crosses over this Summer, is going to be an absolute problem.
