Item: Kusan: City of Wolves
Rating: 4
Author: marcoleo

Kusan: City of Wolves throws you into a neon-lit port city where everyone is an animal and almost everyone wants you dead. I played about six hours of it on PC, died more times than I’d like to admit, and came out the other side genuinely impressed. If you liked Hotline Miami, this is an easy game to recommend.

You play as Jin. He is an ex-soldier who now works as a hired gun in the city of Kusan. His new job is to protect a girl named Haru. She has powers that could destroy the whole city if the wrong people get hold of her. The story is simple to follow, but it has some good surprises. People Jin trusts turn out to be lying to him. People who seem bad have real reasons for what they do. The story is told through comic book-style panels between missions. They look great, and they never slow the game down.

Kusan: City of Wolves Gameplay Review: Fast Combat and One-Hit Kills

The gameplay is simple to explain but hard to master. One hit kills Jin, while most enemies need two to go down. This makes every room feel like a sort of puzzle. You have a gun, a knife, your fists, and a mechanical arm called the War Hand that makes clearing a room feel genuinely satisfying.

There are 54 stages, and new enemies keep showing up to test you: gunmen, enemies with shields, and fast enemies with spinning blades. The best part of the game is the upgrade system. You unlock upgrades and place them on a grid, like a puzzle. Every upgrade takes up space, so you have to choose carefully. I died a lot more because of bad choices than bad reflexes, which is exactly the kind of difficulty I want from a game like this.

Kusan: City of Wolves Art Style: Cyberpunk Noir Meets Pixel Art

Visually, Kusan is a neon, rain-soaked cyberpunk city populated entirely by anthropomorphic animals. Jin is a panther, and the rest of the cast ranges from wolves to rabbits. Think Blade Runner filtered through Blacksad or Beastars. It sounds strange, but it works.

The pixel art during fights is detailed, and the comic book art during the story is even better. My only complaint is that fights can get messy to look at when there are a lot of enemies and a lot of blood on screen. Sometimes it is hard to see what is happening, and I occasionally took a hit I never saw coming.

Is Kusan: City of Wolves Good for Streaming?

That said, Kusan is also a fun game to stream. Deaths happen fast, and you restart just as fast, so there is no boring waiting around. Every stage is short enough to make a good clip. This is the kind of game where chat gets excited watching you fail again and again.

The music helps too. It is Korean hip hop and it fits the action really well, though it doesn’t reach Hotline Miami’s epic soundtrack.

STREAMER SCORE

Performance
Streamability
Audience Engagement
Replayability

Summary

Kusan: City of Wolves combines brutal one-hit-kill combat, tactical upgrades, cyberpunk pixel art, and a stylish anthropomorphic cast. Its fast restarts and demanding stages make failure part of the fun, while the War Hand and grid-based upgrade system give its Hotline Miami-inspired action an identity of its own.