The return of a legend at his best, with the son of his greatest enemy....
Overview
Garou Mark of the Wolves is the latest installment of the Fatal fury series. The game takes place years after the death of the old boss of Southtown, Geese Howard. Terry Bogard decides to adopt Gesse's son, Rock, and take him in and train him in the art of fighting. Rock hears about a tournament being held in Southtown, and find out that he can learn about his mother if he comes out victorious, so he and Terry decide to enter and see what they can find out.
Graphics 10/10
Garou has graphics that compare to the graphics of Street Fighter 3, this is by far the best looking game on the Neo Geo. Each character has detailed sprites, fluid animations that seem flawless. The backgrounds to the game are well designed, even the backgrounds that have little to no animation look great. Most stages have 3 different backgrounds for each round, some have the same background, but it will be night time, and they still look fantastic.
Gameplay/Controls 10/10
In Mark of the Wolves, they introduced 3 new abilities to the fighting system...
1. Just Defend, you guard the attack at the moment of impact and you gain a bit of health depending on what move you Just Defend, when you Just Defend you gain the ability to guard cancel which is performing a move during a Just Defend and canceling your guard, it's that simple.
2. T.O.P. which stands for Tactical Offensive Position, can place this on the front, middle or the back of your life bar, what it does is while you're in it, you gain attack power, your life gauge increases gradually and you gain a new attack, and if the attack is guarded it takes a huge chunk out of their guard gauge.
3. Breaks, bu pressing Light Punch and Light Kick durring the middle of your characters breakable move, you're character will stop the move and recover quicker than he/she would without breaking it, this allows you to do some fierce combos on your opponent and if your attack is guarded, you can break it so you don't get punished for it.
The game has great controls, the only move that is hard to pull off is The Griffons/Tizoc's air grab, and some moves cause slowdown, like Rock's Deadly Rave, but this only happens on the home cart and MVS version, this doesn't occur in the Dreamcast version.
Sound/Music 9/10
This game has great voice actors and sound effects, the sound track is awesome, but there are a few stages that have sub par BGM, all of the tracks will get stuck in your head weather you like them or not. Some of the tracks seem like they came out of the 60's, but I still dig'em and so do most others.
Replay Value 8/10
There isn't much replay to this game unless you have a lot of people to play with, just like most other fighters, its hard to enjoy when you just play against the AI, but once you learn the game you'll want to go out and test your skills on everyone. The Dreamcast version has an art gallery that SNK added, you have to play through survival mode and beat the game with every character to gain all of the art in the game.
Overall 9.5/10
Mark of the Wolves is a great fighter that is perfect to have when you have your friends over, just put MOTW, SF3TS and SFA3 all side by side and you'll have yourself a great time. This is the last great fighter to be released by SNK and if this is the final installment of the Fatal Fury series, it was a wonderful way to go out.
- by Master Giby
