The Road to A Great Wrestling Game: An AEW: Fight Forever Review

By Manuel

Players: 1-4 (Local & Online)
Platforms: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, XBox, Nintendo Switch, PC

AEW: Fight Forever is an arcade style wrestling game developed by Yuke's and published by THQ Nordic. It takes the young AEW promotion and translates it to the world of gaming, complete with a roster of nearly 50 wrestlers. It's been officially in development since 2020 and is finally available on PC and consoles. Is this game worth the wait? Does Yuke's redeem themselves of their WWE mediocrity? And does AEW hit it out of the park as well as they did with their wrestling content in general? Read on to find out!

AEW: Fight Forever is the first video game for the AEW promotion that itself has only been around for about four years. Its developer, Yuke's, has been developing wrestling games since the 90s, with their most recent wrestling-related release being the infamous WWE 2K19. For those blissfully unaware, WWE 2K19 was rushed to market in a broken, unfinished state. While it may seem like an odd choice to have Yuke's work on AEW's first title, it's clear that AEW handles its gaming franchise far different than the WWE; something that can hold true about most comparisons like that. Yuke's definitely took far more time and care with this one, and it's unlikely that AEW will turn to the yearly release schedule that harmed Yuke's' titles before. Actually, Fight Forever had something of a long, troubled production that saw it get delayed several times to the point that its roster has become somewhat outdated. All the names you expect are here: Chris Jericho, Kenny Omega, The Young Bucks, Cody Rhodes, etc. The problem is that some wrestlers have either had out-of-the-ring controversies, or have left AEW entirely. CM Punk was originally featured heavily on the cover, but he is all but absent from it now even though he is still playable. Cody Rhodes was formerly Vice President of AEW, and is featured quite heavily within the Road to Elite mode, but has found a new home in the WWE for over a year now. While this means that the game is not as up-to-date as it could be, it can also serve as a sort of time capsule for the earlier days of AEW, which arguably makes it more interesting. Simply put, there's a lot of love imbued into this game, and it's apparent from the extra touches like the little asides to each wrestler's accomplishments when they make their ring entrances, their detailed bios complete with autographs, and even the quotes from various AEW events that make up the game's loading screens. It's clear that this is anything but a rush job, and the extra development time really shows.

William Regal gives all the in-game tutorials.

I named him after my D&D character.

Now with all that out of the way, let's talk gameplay. Gameplay isn't exactly groundbreaking in AEW: Fight Forever, but it does harken back to a different time when wrestling games had control schemes that catered to a more mainstream crowd. The wrestling mechanics present here are both deep, and easy to grasp and master, a rare accomplishment for sure. Attacking of course makes up a lot of the action here, and you can chop and punch with your hands and kick in varying levels of strength to get things going. Standard attacks aside, you can grapple, attack a downed opponent, and perform several moves unique to each wrestler. Each move you successfully pull off raises your momentum meter until it hits the "Signature" or "Finisher" level, which allows you to perform even more powerful special moves in each category. Your signatures are moves that are akin to a wrestler's final moves, but aren't quite as flashy. These serve as a sort of midway point to soften up your opponent for what comes next. If you perform a taunt while in the Signature state, you can then do a Finisher which usually instantly brings an enemy into the "Danger" area, and can even cause them an injury. If your finisher is a submission move this is probably where your opponent will tap out and give up, and if it's a standard move this is where you can pin them for an almost definite win.

Each character has a few moves within each segment of their movelists, these being low strikes, high strikes, weak grapples, strong grapples, signatures, finishers, and so on. Each move is usually performed by either pressing the specific button (x for strikes, b for grapples, etc.) either on its own, or while pressing a specific direction along with it. You can also run against the ropes, toss your opponent into the ropes, climb the turnbuckles for a high-flying move, and even go outside the ring to retrieve weapons from under the ring. Besides attacking, you can counter most moves and grapples, and even trigger certain skills or buffs depending on your wrestler's stats. This might all sound a little much when laid out like this, but it's all rather intuitive, and the game does a good job easing first-time players into gameplay mechanics.

Ladder matches can be tricky.

The deathmaches are a nice touch.

Match-types are probably what a lot of people are interested in and there are quite a few in Fight Forever. First off you can have 1, 2, 3, or 4 wrestler matches where only one wrestler can be the winner by pinfall or submission. These can be quite chaotic, especially when played in multiplayer, and make up the bulk of the match types you'll experience in the game. Besides basic single matches, there are also tag matches which feature two teams of two wrestling with one team winning by pinfall or submission. Special matches include Exploding Barbed Wire Deathmatches, Ladder Matches, and the Casino Battle Royale. Exploding Barbed Wire matches have barbed wire instead of ropes, and either you or your opponent can be damaged by being thrown into them. After a set time the barbed wire explodes and the closest wrestler to the explosion takes extra damage. Ladder Matches have a goal hung high above the ring and you have to reach it by grabbing a ladder out from under the ring, setting it up in the ring's center, carefully climbing to the top, and undoing the prize by rapidly pressing the on-screen buttons. The winner of the ladder match is whoever is able to grab the prize first, with pins and submissions not being a factor at all. Casino Battle Royale is AEW's answer to WWE's Royal Rumble and is a large battle royale match where your goal is to be the last man standing, with elimination occurring by being tossed over the top rope into the ring's perimeter. You can adjust the settings to all match modes, and there is no restriction as to what characters can wrestle each other. This means that female wrestlers can wrestle males ones, and tag teams can be made up of any and all pairings. This really opens things up and separates Fight Forever from other games in the genre. The only negative aside is that there isn't much in the way of tournament modes, or even playing Pay-Per-View events outside of the Road to Elite mode. You basically only have variants on Exhibition Matches.

A bio, complete with their AEW accomplishments.

The AEW History segments are cool.

Custom content is where it's at in most wrestling games, and Fight Forever is no different. Custom content in Fight Forever comes in the form of custom arenas, tag teams, and wrestlers. When it comes to arenas you can either edit an already exist one, or "create" a new one. I put quotations around the word create because you have very limited options at your disposal. There are very few things that can be changed, mainly just the ring colors and the entrance ramp styles. You also have four spots near the entrance where you can place random decorative items, but these are just as limited. Adding insult to injury, most of these customization options aren't even visible in actual gameplay, so I'm not sure what the point is to changing the entrance area at all. Creating custom tag teams is a bit more fun as you can add tandem moves to your team, which adds a layer of personalization that is especially relevant if you play a lot of co-op. Sadly, by its very nature, there isn't much to creating a custom tag team beyond moves and names. This leaves only custom wrestlers to discuss.

Create-a-wrestler modes have been found in wrestling games for nearly as long as they've been around. Since Fight Forever promised a somewhat retro experience, I found myself really looking forward to trying out the create a wrestler mode. Unfortunately, the customization options seem far less robust than even games that came out on the PS1. There are barely any options to choose from both in terms of modifying the look of your wrestler, as well as creating their "unique" outfits. In fact, most of the options for outfits are just pre-existing parts from other wrestlers. If you were planning on creating a wrestler that stands out from the rest of the AEW roster, you'll probably be as disappointed as I was. What's funny is that you can actually customize your wrestler's entire movelist, and this is probably the OPPOSITE problem to what I just mentioned as you have far too many options to choose from and very few ways to get through the insanely long lists of moves. A page up or down option might have helped, but the lack of one means you have to spend minutes heading to a move that starts with an "M" when you're in the "A"s. Multiply that by each and every move, and you have most of your customization time spent just picking and choosing which suplex or superkick your wrestler will have. You can actually purchase even more customization options across all categories using the in-game (free) currency, but this feels tacked on with nothing too interesting or original locked behind these paywalls. It can be argued that updates and DLC can fix the lack of customization options, and I personally do hope that this is the case, but that's not really something that I can talk about in this review.

I didn't even mention the minigames!

There's even an AEW trivia game.

Seeing as you're going to spend a big chunk of time in the "Road to Elite" mode if you want your custom wrestler to have any sort of good stats, let's talk about that now. Calling Road to Elite a "story mode" might be a bit of a stretch, but that's essentially what it is. You take a wrestler and go through a full year of AEW, beginning and ending at the Double or Nothing Pay-Per-View event in Las Vegas. Besides travelling around the country, headlining various AEW events, you also get to see the IRL counterpart to this journey by way of the "AEW History" segments that feature real clips from news conferences, matches, and more. Your goal on the Road to Elite is to become the AEW World Champion, and you can actually achieve that goal rather quickly. Getting the World Championship is actually probably easy as it's done in a standard one-on-one match, a type of match that makes up maybe less than half of what you'll take part in during the Road to Elite.

You actually play through just about every match type (except for the Exploding Barbed Wire Deathmatch) throughout your run, and even experience alliances, betrayals, and other typical wrestling drama along the way. The Road to Elite mode is broken into four main blocks, representing four big AEW Pay-Per-View events. Each block has four weeks, three weeks are spent preparing for and setting up the PPV, and the final week is the PPV event itself. Each week that isn't the PPV week sees you participate in a smaller main event for AEW's flagship TV show, AEW Dynamite. Before you get to these matches though you get to train to earn skill points, eat regional food to regain stamina, go sightseeing to help raise your mood, participate in fanmeets, and more. These events give you points, money, and alter your in-game stats that affect your performance in the ring. At various points you meet with other AEW wrestlers and either share some random banter, or you kick off/continue a feud that ends in some sort of match at AEW Dynamite or the upcoming PPV. Eventually you get the opportunity to wrestle even more matches at house shows or AEW's second TV show, AEW Rampage. You can use money earned to purchase week-long buffs, and a souvenir shirt for each city visited, and you can use skill points to increase your wrestler's stats, acquire active and passive skills, and generally make them into a powerhouse able to take on anything the main AEW roster can throw at them. It's a fun mode, and I especially love how it ties in actual AEW history, but it's a far cry from an immersive story/career mode. It's by no means boring, and I like the twists and turns that took place between the other wrestlers, but at the end of the day it pretty much only serves as a way to power-up custom wrestlers and little else. Also, while there is some element of randomness to each run at the Road to Elite, I can't see anyone really giving Road to Elite a full second or third run unless they really want to beef up their custom roster.

This group is weird lol.

Top Ten Anime Betrayals

I have some mixed feelings when it comes to graphics as they are definitely going to be a point of contention for many. First of all Fight Forever looks like it came from a previous console generation. Maybe a PS3 game, or early PS4 at best, but definitely doesn't look like something that would be releasing in 2023 on modern consoles like the XBox Series and the PS5. The thing about this though is that I played the game on the Nintendo Switch and I was impressed by how smoothly it ran on what is most definitely the least optimized platform it was released for. I'm not sure if overall graphic compromises were made so that it could run on the Switch particularly but having heard horror stories about past Yuke's wrestling games being practically unplayable on the Switch, this was something I embraced. While I'm glad it works as advertised on the weakest of platforms, I have to admit that this game isn't the prettiest thing available in wrestling gaming right now, but it isn't without its charm. All this aside, I do want to talk about some real problems when it comes to graphical performance. While the framerate does manage to stay relatively consistent, there are weird moments where the action "jumps" forward as if a chunk of animation frames just never loaded in. There's also lots of crazy hair physics if your wrestler has long hair, with each strand sometimes having a mind of its own. I've even seen the ring ropes glitch out when I try to climb them, and there's just so many other little graphical glitches that I can't begin to list them all here. The thing is though, none of them are game-breaking and all of them are usually very brief and return you to normal gameplay fast. I don't like to talk about patches if I can help it, but considering that the problems with the game are actually kind of light, I hope that most of these glitches get patched out as time goes on.

The waitresses face in this pic is priceless.

They even acknowledge the lack of voiceover.

Let's talk controls for a bit as they can be somewhat hit or miss at times; first the positive. The controls are pretty tight, moves are easy to pull off, and there's even a casual mode if you want to make activating the, even easier. Collision detection can be a little spotty at times but it's nothing too crazy, mainly only coming into play in matches involving more than two wrestlers. Those matches involving more than two wrestlers are where the problems with the controls really start to push their way to the top though. One of the biggest frustrations I experienced while playing the Road to Elite mode was that the final matches pretty much all consisted of 4-Way matches where there could be only one winner. Switching between who you are attacking in these type of matches was the single worst thing I experienced in Fight Forever. The game tries its best (and fails) to switch automatically to the closest opponent and you can do switch between them all manually by pressing L3. Neither option is very intuitive and I found myself wishing either the game itself was better at switching between opponents automatically, or maybe something like highlighting came with the manual switching. More often than not one of the computer-controlled wrestlers will steal a pinfall from whoever you've been weakening, and the game will do its best to keep you from targeting the exact person you need to attack to stop it. There wasn't a single 4-way match that didn't come with a high level of frustration, and I really can't imagine anyone finding these types of match’s fun. Other than that, my only other gripe with the controls came from me thinking that the controls could've been mapped out better, but this is something you can change on your own through options.

Some of the ring entrances are cool.

I eventually preferred submission moves.

Music is an interesting topic to talk about here since just about every track in Fight Forever is a licensed song. This isn't a negative though, actually it's pretty impressive that the game pulled out all the stops when it came to keeping all the entrance songs accurate to each wrestler, and the overall AEW experience in general. There is some original music too though, and it too is well-done and has just the right vibe needed for wherever it's placed. A small negative when it comes to the music being mostly licensed is the fact that this means that streaming, or recording/uploading videos, of gameplay is all but impossible in today's world of copyright claims and strikes. It's a good thing that this review is only written and has no audio component... Speaking of having no audio component, let's talk about Fight Forever's voice acting; or lack thereof. I was surprised when I found out that the entire Road to Elite mode exists in silence. Not a single wrestler is voiced, and the match commentary only exists before and after matches. I'm not sure if the lack of voice acting was for license, budget, or time reasons, but it's the single most jarring aspect of the game. I can't stress it enough how weird it is to see a modern game, especially a relatively high-profile release like Fight Forever, have long stretches of the game where you don't hear a single spoken work that isn't from the music. The only other noteworthy thing to mention when it comes to sound is that the aforementioned AEW History clips DO feature actual AEW talent speaking out loud, a rarity for this game apparently.

You tag partner is always computer controlled.

Chris Jericho about to lose his belt!

Now I mentioned at the top of the review that I had only the vaguest of knowledge about AEW before picking up this game, and came in only with the most basic knowledge about wrestling over the past decade or so. With this limited foothold I quickly realized that Fight Forever managed to rekindle the dormant love for wrestling I had in my youth. A while back I saw a quote where Kenny Omega compared Fight Forever to Yuke's older titles like WWF No Mercy and Virtual Pro Wrestling. I took this to heart and figured that since I was a fan of games from that era, I just had to check out this game too. I don't regret that choice in the least, and I now feel that this is the perfect gateway into the AEW promotion in general, if not wrestling games themselves overall. Whether this becomes a gateway to general wrestling fandom or not really depends on individual players, but the possibility is there. Even if that route isn't taken, the statements regarding the more "retro" feel of Fight Forever's gameplay were pretty spot on, so you might want to give this one a look if you were like me and wanted to play a 90s styled wrestling game.

With all the available options, and the lengthy Road to Elite mode, even the average player will be hard pressed to experience everything Fight Forever has to offer without playing for many, many hours. There's even some unlockables in the form of characters and customization options that will take you some time to get through. Furthermore, creating a stable of competitive custom characters can take up dozens of hours too, if you don't mind going through Road to Elite once for each of them. What I mean to say here is that one doesn't have to worry much about replayability here, Fight Forever offers that up in spades. I didn't even cover the game's online modes, leaderboards, and weekly challenges. There's just so much to keep one invested and I think this will be a game that I will be returning to for quite a while. I don't usually like the idea of DLC filling out parts of the game that aren't present at launch, but I also look forward to what DLC options will bring in the future, especially if it means more customization options. Wrestling fans will really get their money's worth here.

I regret the hair, but not the win streak!

I got that belt though!

AEW: Fight Forever had a troubled road to release, that is for sure, but I think that the game is somewhat better for it. Its overall lack of final polish may put off some, but there is a strong game here, and I really do recommend it to both fans of AEW and fans of wrestling games in general. I would even go so far to recommend it to casual gamers too, but perhaps that's where the limits of the game's charm end. Yuke's really redeemed themselves following the fiasco of WWE 2K19, and I hope that they produce more wrestling games down the road, perhaps even another AEW game in a style of this one. You really can't go wrong, no matter what platform you choose to pick up AEW: Fight Forever on. Grab this one now while it's on a launch sale, create your own custom wrestler, and gather some friends for a bit of old-fashioned couch co-op; I know that's what I have planned for when this review is done.

For More Information on AEW: Fight Forever:
https://aew.thqnordic.com/

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Story: B
Gameplay: B
Graphics: B
Music/Sound: B
Value: B+

Overall: B

Pros:
+ Gameplay harkens back to older wrestling games, but adds modern presentation to the mix.
+ Match types, challenges, the large in-game roster, and the create-a-wrestler mode really draw players in.
+ Being the first AEW video game, it does a good job introducing newcomers to both the promotion, and its wrestlers.
+ The music, live action clips, and use of real-life storyline elements really help with the immersion.
+ A strong online mode, and regular rotating challenges, add to the game's replayability.

+/- Redeems Yuke's reputation as a top tier wrestling developer.

Cons:
- The lack of voice acting is very noticeable at times and makes many cut scenes awkward.
- While the game does run really well, the outdated graphics do leave something to be desired.
- Certain control issues, like switching between targets in multi-wrestler matches, could've been ironed out before release.
- Custom options for wrestlers, arenas, and teams don't feel as full or robust as they could be.
- The game's shaky history with delays leaves the in-game roster feeling somewhat wonky at times.

A copy of this game was provided to us free-of-charge by the publisher for the purpose of this review. This did not affect our review in any way.

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Time for me to cash out!