Kusan: City of Wolves

Jin is an ex-soldier turned gun-for-hire in a rain-soaked, neon-lit city that's stopped pretending it isn't run by violence, and Kusan: City of Wolves wants you to feel every second of that violence rather than watch it happen to someone else. This is a top-down shooter built in the language Hotline Miami popularized — one hit kills you, precision beats speed, and getting good at a level is the actual content — and it's confident enough in that language to lean on it completely rather than soften it for a wider audience.

Fifty-four stages, no shortcuts

The headline decision is structural: fifty-four hand-crafted stages across multiple chapters, not a procedurally generated gauntlet. That choice matters more than it might sound like it should. Games in this genre that lean on randomization are, by design, asking you to get lucky as often as they're asking you to get good; a hand-built stage is a fixed puzzle, and mastering it is mastering something the designers actually intended rather than something the algorithm happened to produce. Skill-based puzzles and S-rank challenges sit on top of the core campaign for players who want the game to keep testing them after the story stages are cleared.

The War Hand progression system ties directly into that philosophy. Upgrades come from chaining kills and parries rather than accumulating currency through repetition, which means getting better at the moment-to-moment combat is the same activity as building your loadout. Firearms and blades unlock through play rather than a shop, and the customization on offer is about matching a playstyle you've already found rather than picking one from a menu before you understand what any of it does.

Bosses that ask a real question

Boss fights are the clearest evidence of a team that understands the genre they're working in. Rather than damage-sponge encounters that test patience more than skill, Kusan's boss battles lean on distinctive mechanics and high-stakes attack patterns that demand you actually read and answer them — closer to a rhythm-based duel than a straightforward gunfight. It's the kind of design that separates a genuinely good entry in this space from one just borrowing its aesthetic.

Presentation with real identity

Comic-panel cutscenes, sharply framed and cinematically paced, do a lot to make the city and its conspiracy feel like more than a backdrop for the shooting. Loptimist's soundtrack, built from Korean hip-hop's energetic 808s and loops, gives the violence a rhythm that matches the genre's best examples rather than just gesturing at them. None of this reinvents what a stylish, hardcore top-down shooter is supposed to look and sound like — but it executes that established formula with real craft rather than treating the aesthetic as decoration.

What this review can and can't tell you

This is a same-day release, so what's available is critical reception rather than a settled player consensus. Early scores are strong — 8.4 out of 10 from Inven, 9 out of 10 apiece from Gamer Social Club and Gameliner — and outlets have reached for Hotline Miami as the honest comparison rather than the lazy one. What isn't yet knowable is how the difficulty curve holds up over dozens of hours of real player feedback, or whether any specific stage or boss becomes a notorious sticking point once thousands of players have actually fought through it. Worth revisiting once that picture fills in.

Final verdict

Kusan: City of Wolves is a confident, well-crafted entry in a genre that punishes half-measures, and it doesn't make any. Fifty-four hand-built stages, a kill-chaining upgrade system that rewards actually getting better, and boss fights built as tests rather than checklists add up to a game that knows exactly what it's for.

It lands at eight rather than higher mostly because of what it deliberately doesn't do — no roguelike variety, no co-op, nothing to soften the difficulty for players who aren't already sold on this specific kind of punishing precision action. For the audience it's built for, that's not a weakness. For anyone outside that audience, it was never going to be the game that converted them, and it isn't trying to be.

Reviewed at launch, 30 July 2026 — check the store listing for current pricing.

If your idea of tension is a slower burn than one-hit deaths allow, Wanderer trades Kusan's split-second precision for a much longer game.