Thoughts and Impressions on AEW: Fight Forever

In 2020, I wrote an article titled, “Now is the Time for an AEW Video Game to Take Over.” Unfortunately, despite purportedly being in development with an experienced studio before All Elite Wrestling had even held its first event, they weren’t able to strike then. In fact, it would take quite a while before they were ready.

Now, on the one hand, there’s that old adage about “A rushed game…” On the other hand, even with that in mind, peoples’ patience is only willing to go so far before they start expecting results on par with the wait time. So with a wait of more than two and a half years from when the game was officially announced, how well does AEW: Fight Forever manage to deliver?

On that front, opinion has been nothing if not a bit divided. AEW and Yuke’s set out to deliver a spiritual successor to syn Sophia’s seminal body of Nintendo 64 wrestling game work: WCW vs. nWo: World Tour, WCW/nWo: Revenge, WWF WrestleMania 2000, and the pinnacle, WWF No Mercy. To that end, AEW executive vice-president Kenny Omega even brought the director of those games, Hideyuki “Geta” Iwashita, on board to help steer the ship towards that lofty goal.

And they succeeded. More or less. For better or for worse. On the one hand, those were great games. On the other hand, those were great games from more than twenty years ago.

Let’s just break it down, piece by piece.

First, there’s the elephant in the room. Without a doubt, the biggest lightning rod attracting potential criticism to this game has been the graphics.

In something of a parallel to now, back in the PlayStation/Nintendo 64 days, it was WWF Warzone and WWF Attitude that used digitized graphics on top of 3D models in attempt to create more life-like characters, while WCW vs. nWo: World Tour and WCW/nWo Revenge used a style that was more… well, video game-y. Now, decades later, the parallel still holds albeit with AEW standing in for WCW. And to some degree, the results are more or less the same, albeit much more advanced.

When the digitized look is applied consistently across the board and done well, it can look really good. However, that doesn’t always seem to be the case, and some WWE characters don’t tend to look as good as others, resulting in a mish-mash of quality.

In AEW: Fight Forever, the character don’t look realistic. They look like video game characters (or some would say action figures, which isn’t bad, either, considering how far both video game and toy tech have come). And from one character to the next (barring DLC, which I don’t have), they’ve all managed to look great so far. You can easily tell who is who without difficulty. Occasionally, someone will look a little off, perhaps due to the angle or the lighting or some other such element in play. But let’s face it, not every picture of a person taken in real life is perfect, either — there’s a reason some people make sure photographers get “their good side.”

The environments are largely simple, but good — they basically look like they do on TV. There are other environments and such that take place between matches for the game’s story mode, or in mini-games. These look fine. Nothing groundbreaking, but they get the job done for the brief moments you’re there.

I suppose that naturally brings us to the game’s Create-A-Wrestler options.

To be blunt: It’s not the most robust character creator you’re going to find, by far. Compared to the refinements that have been made to the WWE version over the years, to say nothing of other titles like Soul Calibur, AEW: Fight Forever‘s character customization options feel downright basic.

And yet, to some degree, they sufficed. While I couldn’t recreate the shadowy masked man clad in black I made as my wrestling persona back in the day, or anything very outrageous, I was nevertheless satisfied with the straight-up recreation of the real-life me I was able to make. Not quite as good as the carefully-crafted models of real AEW talent present in the game, but still, I was pleased with the result.

Well, mostly. Some of the options were kind of gated off in ways I didn’t much care for. As builds go, I probably fall more towards a Kevin Owens (nee Steen) than Lex Luger, if you know what I’m saying. As a result, I tend to prefer to keep my shirt on, much as he does. But while you can wear a shirt as entrance attire, you cannot wear it as in-ring attire. That is, unless you opt to wrestle in your entrance attire… which includes my hat, which I’d rather not wear in the ring, if for no other reason than Jake Hager is the only person who wears his hat in the ring. (Though not any more, per the recent breakup of the Jericho Appreciation Society, but I digress.)

I’ve seen others who have recreated themselves in the game as well, and seemed pleased with the result. If you’re not trying to get too fancy of extravagant — to make the next Undertaker or Bray Wyatt or Luchasaurus or something — then the CAW features should be largely sufficient, despite being so basic. That said, changing color is nothing if not unintuitive — you basically make your selection, back out to the menu above it, and then choose to customize it there. It’s really weird.

That’s just on visuals, though. As for naming, a bigger vocabulary to choose from would be nice. Like “night” and “train”. I’d even settle for cobbling together “Naito” and “rain.”

Incidentally, created character or no, everyone in a mirror match wears the same exact clothing — style, color, accessories, the whole bit. Not gonna lie, it made watching a computer-controlled match between four Orange Cassidys fun, but I imagine it would be extremely confusing to play.

There are other customization options, too, such as for your own Arena. I didn’t get to delve into this too much, but you can customize a lot of features using different AEW sets as a base. Mats, turnbuckles, ropes, mats outside the ring, the floor outside the ring, the stage, the furniture/props… there’s a lot you can do here.

Incidentally, a lot of the various things to buy for customization of your characters or arenas can cost a lot of in-game moolah. Fortunately, if you’re able to pull of seven-star matches like me, that money just comes rolling in!

But in all seriousness, getting the cash to buy stuff in the game is pretty easy, so if you want something, be it a dragon to sit on the entrance stage as you enter or to bring Cody Rhodes back from finishing his story in WWE, it won’t take you long to do. The only thing that might take a while to get is if you’re going for literally everything.

Hm, I don’t have a good image for talking about the sound and music, so I’ll just go into it here. The soundtrack is pretty robust, featuring a lot of entrance themes for wrestlers who are here, some who aren’t here anymore, 8-bit versions of some, TV show music, and even some original stuff by guys who compose for AEW, like Mikey Rukus and Max Caster.

You can set up your own personal jukebox of music that plays during your match (be sure to crank that slider up, though — at its default level, I didn’t even realize there was music) and throughout the menus. Unfortunately, this (and during character creation) is about the only time you can really enjoy it, as entrances are really short, so there’s no time for any of it to really get going at that point. At least you can control the pyro and effects for everyone’s entrances during the five-to-ten seconds it lasts.

Speaking of abridged sounds, the lack of commentary kind of sticks out as well. It’s rather bizarre — they got everyone from Excalibur to Taz to Tony Schiavone and even Jim Ross to voice bits for this, but it’s all either during tutorials or after the match, stuff like that. I get live commentary during a match may not be for everyone, but I’d rather have an option to turn it off than to not have it at all. This is one of those instances where you feel like maybe AEW and Yuke’s adhered a little too closely to their 25-year old inspiration.

Where that same adherence is less of a drawback is in the gameplay. Much like the aforementioned Nintendo 64 games, AEW: Fight Forever is easy to pick up and play. I’ve seen comparisons to Super Smash Bros., and that’s not unfair, as you can execute many moves by either pressing a button or a button in tandem with a direction on the stick, and get different moves appropriate to who you’re using.

It might require a little bit of getting a feel for it before newcomers can really get going, but check out the video of my wife and I playing on our “Nadia & David Ruin Video Games” stream below — she actually straight-up beat me a few times, and I’m the one familiar with these.

As you can see above, there’s a good few different match types available here. You’ve got one-on-one, tag, triple-threat, and fatal four-ways, and you can tailor the rules to your liking. Specialty matches are available as well, including a ladder match, the Casino Battle Royale, and the Exploding Barbed Wire Death Match, which is a ton of fun, and ends better than the real thing did (though there’s a secret where you can re-enact the infamous ending to the original). A Stadium Stampede match has been talked about as future content as well, though details about that are scarce.

That said, there are some hitches. In particular, the Casino Battle Royale only allows four participants at a time, and so it doesn’t feel quite as chaotic as it perhaps should. While I don’t expect them to have the maximum of 21 participants involved at once, the basic rules of the CBR start with five wrestlers and go from there, so it’s not even providing you with that much of the authentic experience. It’s good, but at the same time, feels like it’s missing something in that regard.

To that same point, the cap of only four active wrestlers at a time also means there’s no trios action for three-on-three matchups, which AEW officially established with their Trios championship last year. This might be one of those times where they adhered too closely to the original blueprint.

“Road to Elite” is another fun mode that offers a nice bit of replay value. It re-creates the first year of the company’s existence, although not with everyone who was in the company at the time. Consider it a “What If?” sort of scenario. “Wins and losses matter” isn’t just a tagline here, as where you go and what you do can affect the path you take, so there’s a fair bit of replay value here.

It’s also the way to build up a created wrestler’s stats. Sure, you can use whoever you like from the available roster, but it’s the created wrestlers who stand to benefit the most from it with various stat boosts, abilities, and other such things that will take you from bathroom break to main event royalty. Personally, I loved the interactions with other wrestlers on the road, and checking out various local tourist traps and delicacies.

Unfortunately, I was hoping to use someone else for my first trip through: the late “King of Harts,” Owen Hart, who is included in the roster. To my regret, it turns out that you have to unlock him, and you can’t use money — you have to win 100 matches in Exhibition Mode to do it, as I understand it (not quite there yet). And I had to find that out through other means online, as the game really tells you nothing about how to unlock things that don’t have a price tag on them here, and it’s one of the game’s more frustrating elements — especially when different sources online can’t seem to quite agree about specific details.

Mini-games are also included. I don’t really know what to say about these. They’re fun time-killers, more are unlockable, and even more are coming as downloadable content. They’re neat, but they’re really a bonus, and probably not why you’re buying the game.

In terms of performance, I didn’t really have any issues when I played the game. It chugged a little for a second here or there in more intense matches (i.e. Casino Battle Royale) on Switch, and the particle effects there weren’t as good as on Xbox, but it was good enough for what doubles as a portable version of the title. In other words, the usual story for something where Switch is a cross-platform option, it seems.

Well, I did encounter what I think is one bug: During a Casino Battle Royale, I tried to look up moves for my character, and it instead gave me the move list of someone else. Given inputs are largely the same, as mentioned above, it didn’t hinder me much. I just wanted to know how to perform one specific function, and didn’t get to figure it out.

So far, AEW: Fight Forever seems to be doing well. According to PWInsider (via WrestleZone), AEW President Tony Khan said, “I’m thrilled with the launch. I think Fight Forever has been well received. And the future is really strong. I mean, it was important that we get off to a strong start for sales; and we did. And the sales have been great. We got really exciting sales data back from THQ. And that is tremendous. The receipts so far have been amazing, and the future is really strong.

“I’m excited about the launch of Stadium Stampede mode and what that means. And I think there’s several really exciting developments for the game that will continue to drive interest in it over time, and it’s already off to a great start. So it’s really exciting to have AEW: Fight Forever available to fans now.”

It’s a good start, and if they continue to support it (unlike 2K Games’ WWE titles, this isn’t set to be an annual release), it could be great. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and look forward to where it goes in the future. Some think it’s a bit feature-light for the retail price it commands, and it’s hard to argue that, but hopefully that will change in time.

But, it might be worth it to you. Check out my wife and I playing it, and see what you think here:

Review codes for Xbox and Switch versions provided by THQ Nordic.

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