Kusan: City of Wolves Dev Shares Tips for the Hardcore Top-Down Shooter

A Korean Studio’s First Game Is Already Asking a Lot of You

CIRCLEfromDOT is a Korean development team, and Kusan: City of Wolves is their first game. That’s a fact Jake Yeom, the studio’s CEO and game designer, mentions upfront in a developer post published July 31 on Xbox Wire. No hedging, no false modesty. Just the setup, and then a page’s worth of genuine advice for players who are about to get absolutely wrecked.

The game casts you as Jin, described as an ex-soldier turned gun-for-hire living somewhere in a city where, as Yeom puts it, “the line between predator and prey has already been crossed.” A mysterious girl carrying what the game calls a “city-grade atomic weapon” gets tangled up in a violent conspiracy, and Jin has to cross every line to protect her, confront his past, and reckon with the betrayal of a commander he once trusted completely. High stakes, neon streets, and death around every corner. Standard-issue setup for a game this punishing, maybe, but the execution is clearly where CIRCLEfromDOT is putting its chips.

Die a Lot. That Is the Strategy.

Yeom’s first piece of advice to new players is refreshingly blunt: don’t be afraid to die. The game is explicitly designed around learning through failure, and Yeom says each death is meant to teach you something. His recommendation is to stay aggressive, keep experimenting, and resist the urge to get frustrated and repeat the same approach.

That philosophy shapes the entire design. Kusan: City of Wolves is a hardcore top-down shooter, and the enemies are built to punish hesitation. Yeom describes them as enemies that “don’t hold back,” which in practice means players who try to play cautiously or safely are probably going to have a rougher time than those who push forward, die fast, and adjust.

This kind of death-as-feedback loop is familiar to anyone who has spent time with the harder end of the roguelite or action genre. What matters is whether the game actually teaches you something useful each time it kills you, and Yeom seems confident it does.

Mix and Match Your Way Through the City

The other big pillar Yeom highlights is loadout flexibility. Jin has access to a fairly wide range of tools: the Quantum Knife, the War Hand, a Pistol, a Revolver, a Shotgun, and a Crossbow, along with various abilities and upgrades. According to Yeom, there is not always a single correct way to deal with any given enemy type.

That last part is worth sitting with. A lot of games in this space say there are multiple valid approaches, but in practice funnel players toward one dominant strategy. Yeom is specifically calling out that Kusan’s enemy variety, from basic grunts to bosses, is designed to reward experimentation rather than optimization. Whether that holds up across the full game remains to be seen, but the encouragement to try something different rather than grind one tactic to perfection is a good sign for replayability.

The Quantum Knife and the War Hand in particular stand out as interesting inclusions for what bills itself as a shooter. Having melee options in a top-down game built around bullets suggests CIRCLEfromDOT wants players mixing ranges and styles rather than staying back and playing it safe from a distance.

A Debut Worth Watching

First games from new studios are always a specific kind of interesting. There is nothing to compare Kusan: City of Wolves against within CIRCLEfromDOT’s own catalog, which means the team is establishing its identity and its design philosophy from scratch. The decision to go hardcore and high-difficulty right out of the gate, rather than something more approachable, says something about what kind of studio they want to be.

Yeom’s post on Xbox Wire is part of the ID@Xbox program, putting Kusan: City of Wolves in the company of other independent titles getting a platform push on Xbox. For players who like their shooters fast, punishing, and loaded with enough weapons to keep experimentation interesting, this one deserves a spot on the radar.