Even though I was a child during WWE’s Attitude Era, I never got into wrestling as a youth. It wasn’t until college when one of my buddies brought in a wrestling game for our communal PS2 that I was exposed to professional wrestling. Creating the larger-than-life characters and goofily beating the snot out of each other. While I’m still not a fan of wrestling in general, I do enjoy the odd wrestling video game. AEW Fight Forever was the free PS Plus game of the month, so I decided to give it a go.
There’s a bunch of different acronym companies in wrestling and about half of them turn out to be subsidiaries to WWE, but it turns out AEW is a competitor that’s new on the scene, only being about 5 years old. So, there’s a lot of people on the roster that I don’t know, but there’s also a few past their heyday WWE wrestlers that show up. I recognized Chris Jericho, CM Punk, and Sting. From what little I’ve put together, AEW sounds like the place for WWE wrestlers that had their time in the limelight but weren’t marketable enough to go into a film career. While there are those larger-than-life personalities, AEW does seem to go for less melodramatic storylines. There’s still some professional wrestling silliness, but not as much as I’ve seen from the WWE games I’ve played. AEW also seems to go for that older Attitude era of edgy characters, spikes, and lots of black leather.
But how does the gameplay feel in this wrestling game? It is very similar to that wrestling game I played in college on the PS2. It’s simple to learn with punches, kicks, and grapples. The left analog stick is used to choose from different types of attacks. There’s a focus on keeping the momentum up and varying your moves. Don’t just sit there and clobber your opponent with left hooks; hit him with a left hook, then bounce off the ropes to do a flying kick, then climb up the turnbuckle and do a leaping grapple. There are several difficulty levels, I often played on easy because opponents on medium difficulty were much more aggressive and more likely to spam annoying moves that left me with little chance to retaliate. You can upgrade your wrestler to make their attacks more powerful or give them extra abilities, like immediately leaping up from being downed or climbing the ropes faster.
These abilities are unlocked during the career mode of the game, called the Road to the Elite. It sees you playing through a year in the life of an AEW superstar from nobody to grand champion. I wouldn’t call it a story mode because there’s not much of a plot. There’s a big Pay Per View event at the end of the month and each week ends with a regular wrestling event. These are your standard wrestling events, 1v1, tag team, cage matches, etc. during the week you manage your wrestler’s stats, like they’re a Tamagotchi. You can go to the gym to gain skill upgrade points, but that depletes your energy. You can replenish it by visiting the local eatery of whatever town you’re in. There’s also your wrestler’s motivation that affects how much momentum they have going into a match. You can up that by visiting the local tourist spots or going on a talk shows.
These activities are presented as little visual novelesque scenes. The gym scenes are the same in every town and get old quick. I was debating if I’d rather they be a minigame, but I’m sure that would get old quick and I like having the option to skip them. The restaurant scenes are equally generic, but you get to learn about a different local delicacy in each city. I tried to guess what I'd be eating at each city, some were obvious, like Cheesesteaks in Philly or fried chicken in Kentucky, but there were some others that learned me something, like Geoducks in Seatle or a Poutine salad in Pittsburgh. The sightseeing events are hilariously cheap. Your wrestler stands in front of a blown-up JPEG of the city’s notable landmark and says a little piece. The locations they choose can be random. You’d expect the Space Needle to be the landmark of Seatle, but instead you visit a Starbucks shop. Or sometimes you just visit a nice city park. One of my favorite hilarious locations is visiting the Lincoln Memorial with another wrestler, because the conversation devolves into whether they could take Abe in the ring.
A big factor in wrestling games for me is the customization. AEW Fight Forever does fall behind other wrestling games. You can only choose a few pre-set face and body without the ability to modify aspects like your nose or shoulders or such. I don’t always need the most detailed character creator, but for a game that’s all about having your character’s mug everywhere, some more options would be appreciated. The clothing options fare a little better. There’s a lot of the typical wrestler attire and you can set your ring attire, entrance attire, and everyday wear to be different outfits. The ladies' attire is limited compared to the options for male wrestlers. The entrance animations are short, which help keep gameplay moving, but doesn’t give you much to work with. You can’t stage fireworks to go off at certain times or plan out camera angles. The moveset customization is the most robust of them all and let you flavor your wrestler as a brawler, a high-flyer, or a grappler. Overall, it’s a good enough customization system. My first wrestler I stylized as an Irish bar brawler, so a beer drinking Black Canary. Most of that was just my own head cannon because the game doesn't let you flesh out your personality much.
Luckily, the game lets you play through the career mode as a woman wrestler, which wasn’t usually possible in older wrestling games. It is a different career vs the version for a male wrestler. You spend the first few weeks fighting solely women wrestlers and then you are introduced to a selection of male wrestlers. Most of the matches are either tag team or 1v1s with not many of the special matches from the men’s campaign showing up. There’s not a lot of choices, and most of the mode is a string of wrestling matches. Still, it’s appreciated to have that mode available.
The overall presentation of this game feels a bit cheap. From the reused animations, the JPEG picture backgrounds, and the lack of voice acting. None of the wrestlers voiced themselves in the game. You get an occasional little blurb from the commentators at the start of the match that sounds like they were recorded on cellphones, but during the match they are absent. It’s a bummer because commentators are part of the pageantry of a wrestling match. They are there to hype up your big finisher move by yelling “He got whipped like a government mule!” I noticed at least two spelling errors in the game, such as Lewis & Clark being referred to as Louise & Clark. It was AEW’s first game, and it felt like a cash grab or a testing of the waters to see if they are worth investing in. Though in a nice turn of events, they don’t have a lot of content locked behind paywalls and microtransactions. Everything can be earned in-game.
All in all, AEW Fight Forever had some solid gameplay that kept bringing me back for one more match. The repetitive bits started to grind on me towards the end of my career run and the overall lack of polish on presentation does make this game feel like a quaint PS2 throwback. If you enjoy a good wrestling game I would recommend this game, but at a deep price.
