AEW Fight Forever Review
Did you know that there are 82 branded WWE video games? This does not even include games where the likeness of WWE personalities are included. 82 may not seem like a lot until you realize there are only 57 games for all the other wrestling promotions combined. There have been only 2 AEW games but both are on mobile so does that really count? Does it? Correction: there were only 2 AEW games. Can a new one join the main event or will it relegated to jobbing the undercard?
Developed by Yuke’s and published by THQ Nordic, AEW Fight Forever is a throwback arcade wrestling game. This is actually Yuke’s first wrestling game since WWE2K19 but they are no strangers to the sport. Gone is the realistic (define irony…) simulation style we have grown accustomed to with the WWE2K games and in with some good ol’ fashioned rasslin’. In the words of Jim Ross, “It’s gonna be a slobber knocker!”
The first thing you will notice when you start up the game is that there are a ton of ways you can play. Play it safe and choose a 1 on 1 match or live dangerously and go right for the Exploding Barbed Wire Death Match.
I cannot believe I am writing this but the developers probably should have thrown in a quick tutorial. Nothing fancy but similar to the ones in fighting games where you go over the basics. It is easy to punch, kick, and grapple but what about changing targets or tagging in or even jumping in to break up a pin/stop someone from doing the same? I ended up googling how to change targets. It is a good thing I did because the game did not instruct me on such a feature until I was ¾ through the story mode. What was odd was that the game did provide some basic tutorials for other things like tagging your partner or picking up items as they were happening. Perhaps it was all happenstance and my game just did not roll out that particular tip until it was a little too late. Either way, a brief tutorial would not hurt (especially if you give the option to skip for those who are a little impatient).
Road to Elite is AEW Fight Forever’s career/story mode. After choosing a wrestler or creating one, you start the prologue. Male wrestlers enter a battle royale match while females/non-binary are thrust into a 4-way match. This goes for wrestlers from the roster as well as created ones.
Winning this match puts you on the path to the title. Losing unlocks a different story route leading to the tag team titles. There are actually three possible story routes for each of the 4 chapters that make up Road to Elite and your actions during previous chapters affect which one will happen in the following chapter. The first chapter technically only has 2 possible outcomes: win the battle royale/4-way match and vie for the championship or lose and go for the tag titles.
Side note: the game somehow made championships pointless. If you win all the matches in the first chapter, you fight for the AEW championship at All Out. If you win, you become AEW’s first world champion (the storyline is basically treating AEW as this new organization). You even watch a clip of Chris Jericho winning the first world championship.
You never defend the title nor does anyone even make reference to the fact that you are the champion. Seems a bit silly and wasteful.
After the prologue, a number of factors can affect the routes you take including the wrestler chosen and/or your win/loss record. Chapters are broken up into weekly structures that end with a pay-per-view appearance after the 4th week. You are given a number of turns for activities before you head to the weekly AEW Dynamite or the monthly pay-per-view event. The activities are as follows: working out, dining, and going out. Eventually, you unlock a choice of an additional match you can participate in before heading to the weekly show. You do have to decide which activities to partake in as you only have limited turns.
Each of the activities provides its own set of perks and you have to make the decision on what is needed for each week. Things to watch out for are your energy levels which maxes at 100 and your morale which maxes out at excellent. You can easily buy boosters with the money earned from matches or you can properly utilize the activities. Dining always restores 60 energy so you will almost never choose that activity first. Selecting dining will take you to a local restaurant where you enjoy food from the area like cheesesteaks in Philadelphia and poutine in Canada. Working out is a good place to start plus you can use dining afterwards to restore the energy spent. The 3 levels to working out are light workout, standard routine, and intense training. The harder the workout, the more skill points you earn. High energy allows for workouts without the risk of injury. You can get hurt in this mode and, if you are familiar with any other sports game and their story modes, you miss time while you heal. The other activity you can participate in is going out which includes a choice of the following: sightseeing, going on a talk show, meet & greets, and mini-games. Each of these options can reward morale, energy, money, and/or skill points.
A quick note on skill points. If you use an actual AEW wrestler for Road to Elite, skill points have no value. Skill points can only be applied to create a wrestler. It makes some sense because the AEW wrestlers already have allocated stats but also seems odd that they serve no purpose. When you do complete Road to Elite, all unused skill points are converted to cash for use in the in-game shop but you will be earning cash anyway from other activities.
High morale increases the rate at which you gain momentum in a match so you should keep an eye on that stat when choosing your activities. Mini-games are the most entertaining of the choices. The games range from trivia and memory games to carnival-esque games like running around and collecting coins (while dealing with 3 other wrestlers) or tossing bombs in the ring to score points. There are no drawbacks to the going out option so you should try and fit that into one of your turns before heading off to the next match. Speaking of matches, eventually, you can unlock Rampage and Dark which are optional matches to participate in as one of your turns of the week. One thing to keep an eye out for is when activities have an exclamation point next to their listing. This will advance a storyline or set up new matches for your wrestler. Be warned: all of the activities are filled with incredibly cheesy and groan-worthy conversations. I am not saying it is a bad thing but awards will not be handed out for the writing here.
The gameplay portion of this game is arguably the best part. Fans of the N64 WWF No Mercy and WCW/NWO Revenge will feel right at home. In fact, the game director of those games, Hideyuki “Geta” Iwashita, is the director for AEW Fight Forever. Once you get to the ring, there is nothing to complex to figure out. Your basic moveset includes punching, kicking, and grappling. Grappling plus a face button does a series of different moves (these can be seen via the menu option and are different for each wrestler). Whichever wrestler is in control will build up their momentum faster allowing the use of signature abilities and finishers. On the easiest of difficulties, most matches last around 3-4 minutes. Well, most 1 on 1 matches last that long. Once you have more than 2 participants in a match, it gets a bit chaotic and not the good kind. The game falls apart in a sense here and your takeaway may be one of irritation. For whatever reason, the game defaults to auto-targeting. PROTIP: change this to manual immediately. Pressing L3 (on PlayStation) will allow you to freely change who you target. Unfortunately, this means nothing in certain situations. If you are in a battle royale and take a swing, regardless of who you are targeting, you are going to hit the nearest target. Sure, it is a free for all but maybe you wanted to focus on the opponent who was ripe to be pinned or tossed out of the ring. The other targeting issue comes into play during tag team matches. For reasons unknown, if you jump into the ring while your teammate is the legal man, you automatically target the nearest opponent. Instead of knocking out the guy running in, you break up your own team’s pin. Eventually, I turned on target indicators which helped but this seemed like an avoidable issue. Tag matches also were the cause of frustrations in their unnecessary longevity. Personally, I found it best to try and knock out the opponent not in the ring first before trying for a pin. It was a battle in itself to see if you or your teammate would be able to intercept the opponent breaking up the pin. Since the pin is usually the last thing in the match, none of this takes the fun out of the mayhem that goes on. Performing moves with your tag partner was always fun and it was always a nice sight when you saw someone throw down a table in the ring.
While the gameplay of Road to Elite is enjoyable, there are issues. In addition to championships being equal to throwaway matches, your decisions matter very little when presented with a choice. The story routes are predetermined by other actions so whether you answer A or B when prompted, your fate was already set in stone. The mode is relatively short too which would bode well for replaying to try and unlock additional wrestlers but there is nothing else to do in the game. Exhibition matches only go so far when you play solo and online is hit or miss depending on the player. There are both daily and weekly challenges to earn some extra cash but a complete run of Road to Elite left me with plenty of money to purchase just about anything I wanted. To be fair, there are a limited number of pay-per-views in the real-life AEW so dragging out the weekly structure in-game between each event may make the mode a drag.
For its debut game in the console space, AEW Fight Forever is a decent game that packs a good amount of fun. Having the original director of the premier arcade wrestling games and a developer like Yuke’s definitely helped this vision come to life. There are issues with the main story mode but there is no denying the fun factor. With a stacked exhibition list, replayability is extremely high and that does not even take into account the ability to play online. AEW fans should be pleasantly pleased with this game as will fans of the action-packed, arcade wrestling games of the past.
