AEW Fight Forever Review: Kinda Mid(card)
AEW: Fight Forever – An Impressive Debut for All Elite Wrestling
In the world of professional wrestling video games, All Elite Wrestling’s first offering, AEW Fight Forever, certainly shows promise. Developed by the talented team at Yuke’s and published by THQ Nordic, this game aims to capture the excitement and intensity of the AEW brand. However, it falls short in some areas that prevent it from reaching the same level as its heavyweight competitors.
One of the standout features of AEW Fight Forever is its immersive story mode, Road to Elite. This mode allows players to embark on a journey with their favorite AEW wrestlers or create their own custom competitor. The ability to personalize your character adds a unique touch to the game, allowing you to upgrade their stats and learn special abilities.
Road to Elite is divided into four acts, each taking place in a different city across the United States. As you progress through the weeks, leading up to a scripted match on AEW Dynamite, your choices backstage and in the ring will shape the outcome of your story. The branching paths and multiple endings add replay value and keep the gameplay fresh.
While the story mode is engaging, there are a few drawbacks to AEW Fight Forever. The roster size is somewhat limited, with only 36 male and 13 female wrestlers available. This can lead to a lack of variety in matches, especially for female characters. Additionally, the matches themselves tend to be shorter than expected, leaving players wanting more.
Customization options for your wrestler’s appearance are also disappointingly limited. Male options for heads and hair styles are clunky and lacking in variety, while female characters have a wider range of choices. Furthermore, some odd restrictions, such as not being able to wear a shirt during matches, detract from the overall experience.
The gameplay itself is fluid and enjoyable, with almost no loading times. However, the targeting system can be confusing and inconsistent, making it difficult to focus on specific opponents. This issue, along with the clunky menus, could use some improvement in future updates.
Despite these shortcomings, AEW Fight Forever still manages to deliver an entertaining wrestling experience. The inclusion of top AEW talent and the exciting Road to Elite mode make it a worthwhile game for fans of the genre. The Exploding Barbed Wire Death Match is a standout feature that adds chaotic fun to the gameplay.
In conclusion, AEW Fight Forever is a solid first step for All Elite Wrestling in the gaming world. While it may not have all the bells and whistles of its competitors, it offers a unique and enjoyable experience for wrestling fans. With some refinements and additions, this game has the potential to become a heavyweight contender in the genre.
AEW: Fight Forever
A decent first outing for All Elite Wrestling, but lacks the game modes and customization options to really hang with the heavyweights.DualShockers was provided with a copy of the game for review purposes.
- Platform
- PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4
- Released
- 2023-06-29
- Developer
- Yuke’s
- Genre
- Wrestling
- Some top AEW talent
- Road To Elite mode has a lot of fun moments
- Almost zero loading time
- Exploding Barbed Wire Death Matches are a blast
- Roster size is a little lackluster
- Matches are too short and there’s not much variety
- Custom wrestler visual options are incredibly lacking
- Menus need some serious overhauling
The tag team of Yuke’s and THQ Nordic has put out some of my favorite wrestling games of yesteryear, so when I learned they’d be teaming up again for the first ever All Elite Wrestling game, AEW Fight Forever, I was pretty pumped. But while there are some solid aspects of their newest entry, it needs a lot of polishing.
The big gold buckle on this game is definitely the story mode, Road to Elite. You can go through it with any of the licensed wrestlers included in the game, but it really shines when you use a competitor you’ve made yourself in Custom mode, since it’s your path to upgrading their stats and teaching them cool active and passive abilities, like launching your first attack before the bell’s even rung or adopting Orange Cassidy’s evasive hands-in-pockets fighting style.
Road To Elite plays out in four acts, with a plane dropping you off in a different U.S. city at the start of each week. The first three weeks of each act will lead up to a scripted match on AEW Dynamite, with the final week ending at a Pay-Per-View event (All Out, Full Gear, Revolution, and Double or Nothing, in that order.) I played through twice—once with a male custom wrester based on myself, and another time with a female version of me—and each story played out very differently. The choices you make backstage, as well as your ability to win the matches you’re booked in, will determine specific paths that you’ll go down, and I can tell from looking at the incomplete collection of Snapshots (photos you can take with other wrestlers along the way) that there’s at least one entire path I haven’t seen in each of the four months, as well as things I didn’t see in the paths I did take.
In my male playthough, my very first match was as the first entrant in a 21-man Casino Battle Royale, which I somehow won despite nearly being tossed over the top at least three times. While it was an exciting first step into AEW, two things stood out to me. First, this game can only support four wrestlers onscreen at once, which is exactly half of what WWE 2K23 can pull off.
Second, I was damn lucky to win, because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to switch targets, and my wrestler seemed to just randomly swap between opponents without rhyme or reason, especially when I’d just hit my superkick finisher and was in position to eliminate an opponent. Switching focus wasn’t listed in any of the instruction screens, and while a pop-up tip did eventually inform me how to do it (clicking in the left stick, by the way), I was already more than 75% of the way through Road To Elite by that point, and I’d grown tired of flinging myself off the top turnbuckle and onto the cold hard floor outside the ring instead of landing a sweet moonsault on my prone opponent in the ring.
Still, it started off better than my female playthrough, which began with a four-way one-fall match—easily the hardest match type in the game, due to the combination of clunky opponent-switching (even after I learned how), with not having to be the one pinned to lose. I found the whole ordeal needlessly frustrating.
In between matches, you can hit the gym to pick up skill points, with three levels of intensity and a higher chance of injury with each; eat at a local restaurant to regain stamina, take up a second weekly match on one of AEWs other shows, or go sightseeing or hit up a meet-and-greet or talk show to raise your morale. Honestly, this was the most fun aspect of the game for me. You’ll try different local cuisine based on the city you’re in (and you can even choose a vegetarian diet), and from Pittsburgh’s haunted tours to The Lincoln Memorial, you’ll pick up some legitimately funny (although unvoiced) interactions with other members of the active roster.
Outside the story mode, the game is pretty bare-bones. The only other actual wrestling is in exhibition matches, of which there are a whopping seven types, and of those, only the Exploding Barbed Wire Death Match (which is just as chaotic and fun as it sounds) offers anything you can’t find in almost every wrestling game made in the past 25 years. There’s also a handful of minigames, but they’re hardly worth mentioning.
The roster brings some impressive names even for wrestling fans who’ve never seen AEW; names like Bryan Danielson, Dustin Rhodes, Paul Wight, and Sting, but it’s still pretty small. At just 36 men and 13 women (save for some hidden unlockables), I can see why even my female playthrough of Road To Elite had me in more intergender matches than women-only matches, although letting anybody fight anybody was a nice touch.
With all the inclusive effort put into it (here’s lookin’ at you, vegetarian options), the gender-locking of custom wrestler options was a huge letdown. As my name might have given away, I’m biologically male, and yet my female in-game me looks a lot more like the real me than the best male in-game me I could make. All the male head options ae clunky and square, and none of the male hair options come longer than shoulder-length (have they ever seen professional wrestlers?) Meanwhile, of the twelve (yep, that’s it) hair options available for women, two thirds go beyond the shoulders. And there’s some other custom wrestler restrictions that are just weird.
You can make a shirt part of your entrance attire, but you can’t wear one during the match, so it’s bare chest for all men and decorative brassieres for all women, even though the actual licensed wrestlers don’t have those restrictions. If you’re okay with forgoing pants or shorts, you could wear a singlet, but again, the number of options just sucks. There are nine available full-body costumes for men and just five for women, including slutty maid, slutty Playboy-style bunny, and full-body teddy bear mascot costume. With all that in mind, it’s pretty baffling that this game lets you earn a badge for creating 100 different custom wrestlers, because if you take on that challenge, a lot of them are going to be hard to tell apart.
But the biggest flaw of all may be in the clunky menus. Instead of breaking customization menus into subsections by type or first letter, you just have one big list for each item you select. That’s fine for things like top-rope dives, of which there are only a few options, but any move in the game can be a signature or finishing move, and scrolling through them can be a real chore. The worst moment came when I was trying to scroll through things the ring announcer could call me. It’s one of the few times I was happy with the large number of options, but getting through them was a slog. I used a stopwatch app to time how quickly I could scroll from the default option (Wrestler) to my first name (Matthew), and I found it’s just a hair under 58 seconds. Ouch.
While it’s not my goal here to draw comparisons to that other wrestling game on the market, a quick Internet search reveals that you can get WWE 2K23 for about $20 less than AEW Fight Forever, and to be honest, with its bigger roster, more game modes, and way more customization options, that’s worth considering. If you’re a true AEW fan, then this game was made for you—since it’s the first and only licensed AEW game ever—but there’s not a lot here that its top competitor doesn’t already do better.
Exploding barbed wire matches are admittedly really fun, and there’s a good time to be had in Road to Elite’s schedule management, which makes WWE 2K23’s Universe mode look pretty barren by comparison. I’ll even go as far as saying that the AEW ladder matches play out a lot more realistically (when they’re not glitching; Kris Statlander powerbombed me off a ladder and we both disappeared through the ring floor for a bit) and enjoyably than WWE’s TLC matches. In the end, though, those are about the only categories in which it really hits top marks.
If that sounds like enough to shell out $59.99 to pick up the game at launch, then go ahead, but of the two licensed wrestling games to come out this year, AEW Fight Forever just doesn’t have enough content behind it to hold the top title.
