I Am Enjoying the City of the Wolves Beta

February 21, 2025

I had my PS Plus renewed last month, so I've been just playing fighting games this whole time and that lined up with the CotW beta this weekend. I was already interested in it because I think Fatal Fury is a cool series and SNK has been killing it with their "comeback" post-KoFXIV. I finally got XV recently and have been enjoying it a lot so it reinforced my optimism towards CotW.

And now that the beta has come into my hands... I was right to be optimistic I think. It feels closer to MotW than I thought it would while still also feeling modern. It kept the fun stuff like braking and feints while adding EX moves that you can cancel into each other for cool combos. Course, you're limited by the Rev Gauge which I guess is similar to SF6's Drive gauge and a lot of the mechanics are tied to that.

Something I'm kind of torn on though is the addition of a fifth button. The Rev button. It's main purpose is for Rev Guard, which uses up the Rev Gauge to increase pushblock and negate chip damage. But it's also used for the new level 3 adjacent super. But it's also now used for feints and the universal overhead/anti-air from MotW. And optionally braking though you can use the old input thankfully. And it's also a dash macro? I'm used to it now since I'm playing on PS4 so it's a bit more convenient being on pad but I don't know.

As for the beta itself, it has the common beta issue of occasional server problems but I've noticed that on PS4 and apparently PS5(?) there's noticeable screentearing everywhere which I'm not sure why that is. It's actually really distracting. Doesn't sound like it's an issue on Steam since there's a Vsync option so I don't know what's going on here.

But yeah. I'm having a lot of fun. I've already played a lot so far and I'll probably play a lot more before it ends. And getting to do stuff like this:

is extremely satisfying. I don't know if I'll get the game day one but it's definitely on my radar.

Also unrelated but it seems like my posts are still not appearing in the global feed despite fixing the link so I'm just gonna disable that setting. Oh well.