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.

AEW: Fight Forever aspires to be like wrestling games from the late 90s-early 2000s, utilizing a more arcade vibe as opposed to WWE 2K’s more sim based gameplay. It’s a worthwhile aspiration, and the presentation and play style is easy to appreciate, however it doesn’t take long to recognize the limitations of the game.

It only has a handful of match types, and while they work fine enough, they lack variation, making repeat plays lack consistent excitement.

There’s a Road To Elite Mode, which has you taking either an existing AEW wrestler or a custom character through a year in AEW. The budget is clearly limited as there are barely any spoken dialogue from anyone. The announcers say very little before big PPVs, and it’s generic stuff like “We’re live and sold out in Chicago”. There is some decent fun to be had as you get approached to join stables or have wrestlers confront you backstage to set up future matches on TV or PPV, but it’s not a mode that offers much variety. Its relatively quick nature surely is meant to inspire multiple playthroughs, but there just isn’t enough to warrant going back for another run through.

There are also some mini games, and while they’re cute enough, they just have a very limited shelf life. You’ll have some fun hitting your favorite AEW wrestler trapped in a giant baseball or realizing how little you know about AEW history on a short quiz, but they’re the kind of things you chuckle at for a few seconds then just never really bother with again.

This game’s issues can be summed up with the fact that it’s got a solid base to work on, but lacks content to keep the fun going past a certain point. Character Customization, a vital part of all wrestling games, is disappointingly limited, single player modes only offer mild variation and it just never feels like a big wrestling game despite being priced like one. It’s still fun doing silly stuff like riding a skateboard into a ring and its focus on arcade style play is definitely appreciated, but even die hard AEW fans might feel like the tempting promise it offers is only halfway delivered.

I'm glad I borrowed this from the library cause damn was I disappointed. The stars had aligned for this to be a great game, alas...

I will say, the graphics are nice. The custom wrestler creator, while not as extensive as some wrestling games, had enough to make it worthwhile. The gameplay for singles isn't bad. There were a few things I found a bit odd, but I believe I could have gotten used to them.

The biggest issue I had was with tag team, which is the whole reason my spouse and I wanted the game. While we may play a solo campaign, we like to tag team together. The controls for it, however, just plain suck. Nothing works as it should. The commands aren't responsive and the game will suddenly take control of your player character and not allow you to do anything. Trying to do even simple things like breaking up a pin just plain won't work in any kind of fluid way. Trying to move your attention to the second member of the tag team is impossible. It will simply lock you onto one character arbitrarily and not let you shift focus, even as the other team did a run in on you. Not such an issue for us, but perhaps for others: whoever is player 2 is using player 1's characters, so being able to progress a custom wrestler, for instance, means that player 2 gets the shaft.

I have no interest in a game like this that doesn't have their shit together when it comes to co op. I'm so disappointed. If all you plan to do is play single player, then you will likely be alright with it. I just have no idea how one can make singles matches so good and completely bungle a tag team system. Have I mentioned I'm disappointed yet?

I was a big wrestling fan when I was a kid and young adult (approximately 1992 through 2002) and then mostly checked out. But AEW, and specifically Kenny Omega, made me a fan again. I'm now an AEW die hard so I was excited to check out AEW Fight Forever. I think the last time I spent any real amount of time with a wrestling game was in the SNES era. Fight Forever was sold as being more arcade-style, which sounded fun to me.

Well jokes on me because this stunk. I've never really enjoyed fighting games, so I found everything about it incredibly confusing. The combos and stuff are all hard to remember so I'm just randomly mashing buttons to try to do moves. At no point did I really feel like I was in control of my character. The graphics are pretty bad, which isn't that big of a deal, but could they at least title belts that didn't move like they were from N64?

I tried out the Road to Elite, but it was just punishingly boring. The "story", such as it was, was a total snooze. There was basically no strategy other than working out and eating food, which was also very boring. I tried playing a match online, but I don't subscribe to Playstation Plus so that didn't work (lame).

There appears to be tons of deep customization both for existing wrestlers and create-a-wrestlers, but I don't care about that at all. I just wanted to have fun pretending to be Kenny Omega or Eddie Kingston.

So I bailed. Big waste of money.

Played on a PS4, which isn't an option in Grouvee for some reason.