Old School Nostalgia In A Modern Package – AEW Fight Forever Review

*Note  – I won’t be giving thoughts about online play mode, as I was only able to play briefly with another reviewer for the sake of the review and while it worked well, I was not able to actually able to connect to anyone else to play given the game is not released to the public yet).

Let’s start with initial thoughts and gameplay.  When you get to the main title screen, the menu is very clean, showing a top row of the different game modes.  The game has several different modes; Exhibition, Online, Create a Wrestler, Career mode (“Road to the Elite”), Challenges, and an in-game shop.  Exhibition mode delivers a variety of match types, with 1v1, tag team, trios matches, battle royals, and even an exploding barbed wire death match.  Right off the bat, I wanted to try a simple 1v1 exhibition match to test out basic gameplay and see if it lives up to the hype of the legendary N64 THQ games we all remember and love.  In short, I really do think Fight Forever delivers on this.

The gameplay has a fast Arcade-style feel at first interaction, but once you start to get accustomed to the controls and flow of a match, you realize the controls do closely resemble the N64 wrestling games of a few decades ago, and the gameplay is more simulation style at its core.  The gameplay mechanics are just like the N64 games, with Strong and weak attacks for strikes, grapples, off-the-rope moves, and downed opponent moves, and it’s very easy and intuitive to pick up in a match or two once you understand the mechanics. The screen-capped moves do look good when performed, and character models for each of the wrestlers do look accurate to their real-life counterparts.  I was happy to see the graphics in general were better than some of the initial reports and screenshots showed.  Als on a side note, I think the music is a strong spot for the game.  It has a soundtrack of popular songs you would hear on the radio, with a peppering of songs from Max Caster that were included in the game.

All the wrestlers’ grunts and crowd cheers sound good as well.  The one aspect of sound that I do think severely missed the mark was the commentary.  The commentary from Jim Ross and Excalibur seems limited in nature, and JR specifically sounds like he is in a large auditorium with a great deal of echo.  It just sounds very disjointed and artificial, and it’s a real sore spot in an otherwise good bells and whistles through the menu screens, and during matches.

Next, I will talk about Career Mode.  It’s officially titled “Road to the Elite”.  It has a cool concept with following AEW through its first several years as a company, and your chosen wrestler going through that journey over that time period as well.  Overall, it’s a little basic for a Career mode, but it does have its charm.  The structure of the Career mode has you involved in weekly Dynamite tv shows where your storyline advances (Depending on the outcome of your scheduled match), and a PPV after 4-5 weeks of Weekly television.  During each week, you “fly” into the new city where Dynamite will take place, and can sightsee a local attraction that the city is famous for (I actually really liked this), eat at a restaurant, do a workout, hold a press conference, play a mini-game, or even have a side match on AEW Dark or Rampage.  You have 4 turns to do one of these activities before you are scheduled to wrestle on Dynamite for the given week, and each of those choices results in a few different outcomes: You increase your character’s stats in different ways by way of getting currency to boost your stats (More finishing move slots, power buffs after performing a taunt – things of this nature) and you “meet” different AEW wrestlers during these activities and unlock additional storylines with them (or against them).

There also is a fun little feature where when you run into some of the wrestlers, even if you don’t start a storyline with them, you and the wrestler take a “selfie” together.  There is an in-game photo album you can view to collect photos with all the wrestlers in the game to give Career mode a bit more replay value (There are 60+ wrestlers, so it will take you a while to collect photos with all the wrestlers). 

Lastly, I’ll cover Create a Wrestler mode and the Shop mode.  Before I get into Create a Wrestler mode, I’ll talk briefly about Shop mode.  The AEW shop is your standard in-game shop, where based on the currency you earn in different modes, you can purchase things like new moves, items for Create a Wrestler, alternate costumes for existing wrestlers, mini-games, and unlockable wrestlers (The version I played had Cody Rhodes and Aubrey Edwards in here as unlockable characters).  This was very basic in nature, there really wasn’t a great deal of content in here.  I hope future DLC updates will add more content because initially there does not seem to be much to buy.  

Create a Wrestler mode was the mode that me the most hyped to try initially, and unfortunately left me with a very sour taste in my mouth.  It starts off with a variety of data to help define your created wrestlers like name, hometown, and all the usual things you would set for your character, but when you get to designing the appearance of your wrestler, I couldn’t believe how little customization there was for your wrestler.  From facial features to clothing items, there just wasn’t a lot to choose from besides what wrestlers already in the game specifically have.  This led me to create a fairly generic-looking wrestler. I wasn’t too happy about this at all, and think this is the single biggest weak point of the game.

To be fair and give the Create a Wrestler mode some credit, the move list they had to assign for wrestlers was sizeable and felt closer on par with some of the recent WWE 2k games.  Maybe we are just too point with how right that Create a Wrestler feature is but don’t expect too much from CAW in this game.  One other disappointing aspect of CAW is there is no mechanism to download community-created CAW wrestlers, so we will be regressing to having to print out formulas for CAW wrestlers in the future if this is something they don’t plan on fixing with DLC. 

In wrapping up this review, I think AEW Fight Forever is still worth a try for any pro wrestling fan who is a fan of the AEW brand, or a fan of wrestling games in general.  I don’t think the game offers enough to a casual game who isn’t a wrestling fan to try though.   This was a good (Not great) first attempt at a wrestling game, and despite the glaring issues with CAW mode, and the simplicity of Career mode, the game engine/gameplay mechanics give me hope that future iterations of this game in the years to come can improve upon this first attempt.