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TLDR: Currently the best modern fighting game released.
Fatal Fury is back after 26 years. In that time fighting games have evolved and become more accessible. Fatal Fury City of the Wolves (COTW) feels like like an old-school fighting game from for better and worse. It does have some accessibility options for new players like Smart Style controls and auto-combos but the mechanics and the learning curb for the game do feel harder to grasp than other modern fighters out there.
The single player modes consists of Arcade Mode which features endings for the playable characters except one (for now), a story mode called Episodes of South Town which is the Fatal Fury version of the Word Tour Mode in Street Fighter 6 (on a budget) and Survival Mode.
There is a Tutorial but it is very basic and is even missing some mechanics in the lessons! Training mode is also very basic for a current fighter which is very disappointing as SF6 (which is the gold standard) showed the blueprint of how to do a great training mode and SNK just ignored it. Same goes for the tutorial as they could have had character specific ones. There are Missions which are just combo trials but there are only 5 per character (or 3 per character if you are using Smart Style controls). I would expect 10-15 missions as standard but there you go.
Arcade Mode feels like your standard, old-school arcade mode where you fight a number of one-on-one battles against the case and get a short ending cutscene for your character at the end. Quite enjoyable if you are a fan of these modes. The story carries on from the previous game but there is no refresher and newcomers may be a little lost if they haven't played the previous game in the series.
Episodes of South Town lets you choose one of the cast and play through a story mode similar to SF6 but instead of a large open-world, you get a map with points of interest for various battles, dialog boxes with character portraits and an ending cutscence upon completion. The story was decent at least, especially if you are a fan. They should have sprinkled some artwork throughout this mode to move the story along. The character portraits are stationery during dialog sequences and they are not even voiced. Even SVC Chaos had different expressions on the character portraits and that was over 20 years ago. KOF All-Star did this better and that was a mobile game! What I do prefer over SF6 is that you don't play as some custom avatar and actually get to play as the cast. Definitely could expand and improve this mode overall imho.
There are 17 playable characters with 5 more upcoming this season, which are all free with the current edition of the game. SNK have said that they plan to keep supporting the game for at least 3 years with new characters releasing every couple of months.
Online plays well from the matches I've had but there is no way to differentiate between WiFi and Wired players. You can enter queue whilst training which is nice as well but annoyingly there is no way to disable the search in Training once you have it enabled short of quitting back to the main menu. The cursor in the lobbies moves so slowly so I hope they improve that later. You can view and save replays and block players or request to add them as friends.
The graphics are bright and colourful and have an almost comic book aesthetic. The animations are nice and the backgrounds are well-designed. With the backgrounds, there is one glaring issue I have. Whilst the game runs at 60 fps, the backgrounds run at 30 fps likely for some technical limitation. This is fine for the most part as most stages have a few characters in the background and the rest is stationery. However, on Terry's stage you are on a moving train and the background is moving at 30fps whilst the action in the front moves at 60 fps and would cause me discomfort to look at if I concentrate on the background and I'm not even usually sensitive to this stuff. They should perhaps have an option to make the background stationery if they can't optimize. I don't think the graphics will attract a more casual gamer (despite the heavy marketing push) unlike SF6 or T8 which both feature a much higher budget and hyper-realistic graphics.
There is a Color Edit mode which let's you customize character colors. Very refreshing to see this classic approach taken rather than the scummy micro-transactions in the other fighting games (and don't get me started on DOA!). You get 10 color edit slots per character but that means if you have a character with multiple costumes then you will still only have 10 slots in total rather than 10 slots per costume unfortunately. There is also a Jukebox which let's you customize the music in the game. The music being the standard songs from the game as well as music from throughout the history of the series. You can even create a playlist for a stage so that it will play one of several songs each time. It's a great feature and I hope it becomes the norm.
Now there is some controversy in that SNK have added Ronaldo and a DJ called Salvatore Ganacci to the game in the base roster. I don't like having real-life people appearing in fictional fighting games, especially when the cast have superpowers. It feels very forced to say the least and might have been more acceptable had they been added later as DLC and maybe we could have gotten some actual Fatal Fury characters in those slots. If the Saudi's wanted to appeal to the masses they should have poured more money into the development budget and not shoehorn in celebs because they have ties to the country. Fortunately (at least) a lot of care and attention went into them and their movesets so they are fun to play as.
Now the gameplay is where this game really shines. Honestly it is mechanically the best modern fighting game currently out right now and is very satisfying to learn and experiment with. SF6 is definitely the more accessible game but put the time in to this one and be rewarded. If SNK got anything right with this game then this would top the list.
There you have it. It is a budget title that plays amazingly if a little light on content. Overall it is a fantastic homecoming for Fatal Fury. I hope they continue to support it for years to come and I hope in the future the Saudi's dip into their pockets so that the development budget can be heavily increased and can attract the casual gamer that they are striving for with with expanded tutorials and training options but without compromising on their solid game design. For fans of fighting games I would say don't miss this one and if you are a Fatal Fury fan then just buy it now.