AEW Fight Forever Review: Being the incomplete

Far from elite.

I was really looking forward to AEW Fight Forever. Since its first announcement back in 2020, all of the stars seemed to be lining up correctly. In only a year the newly formed All Elite Wrestling had accelerated to being the first real major rival to the dominant WWE since the closure of WCW almost 20 years ago, and AEW executive vice president and nerd icon Kenny Omega was promising that the company’s first console game would be the throwback to the revered WCW games of the Nintendo 64 that fans had for years begged for. He even brought the studio and a key creative responsible for those games onboard to handle it.

That game is finally here, and while it charmed me for the first hour with its nostalgic feel, AEW Fight Forever disappointed me real fast when I realized that there isn’t really anything much going on with it beyond that.

Unscripted Mildness

AEW Fight Forever feels simple and small in every area. Its $100 AUD price tag begs for it to be compared to WWE 2K23, and it is shockingly bare-bones and shallow in comparison.

The wrestling itself feels mostly pretty good. The tutorials are sorely underdeveloped compared to what the last two 2K releases offered, but anyone should be able to hold their own against the standard AI pretty quick just by getting the feel for any given character’s basic strikes, kicks and grapples. For those who want to go deeper there are guard, counter and positional-based attack systems to master too, but I personally found all of the defensive options available to be way too finicky and fiddly to bother with when quick offensive hits tend to be just as good an option.

It’s all simple enough that Fight Forever is a much more welcoming pick up and play-style game than 2K ever was, and I do appreciate that, but it also sits in this weird limbo of neither being as satisfyingly deep as 2K nor as entertainingly simple and bombastic as something like the brilliant WWE All Stars. Brawling in Fight Forever is fun, sure, but it all just feels kind of surface level.

Light the fuse, bring the snooze

There’s a career mode of course, and the idea behind it is actually pretty clever. Road to Elite drops you into a loose retelling of major story events that occurred over the four years since AEW’s founding, and peppers terrifically chosen video clips from the company’s archives throughout its chapters. Road to Elite allows you to play as a wrestler of your own creation or one from the AEW roster, and while it’s cool that Fight Forever allows someone from the company locker room to be used in career mode when 2K doesn’t, if you choose to do so you’ll be missing out completely on the skill growth features the mode presents as roster members cannot be modified in this way at all. It’s not a particularly deep feature, but given how Road to Elite isn’t particularly deep in any area it kind of sucks to have things cut down even further.

Actual progress in Road to Elite is structured thusly. You fly into a city and have four days to kill before you must wrestle on AEW’s weekly flagship show Dynamite. You can work out at a local gym to increase your skill point currency pool but risk injury in doing so depending on your energy level, you can see the sights or do a media event to increase your motivation – important if you want to go into matches as fired up as possible, eat at a local restaurant to recover energy, face the Young Bucks in an absurd minigame, or skip straight to your scheduled match.

All of the stuff outside of the actual matches is fine, but aside from the minigames which are mostly too infuriatingly difficult against the AI to even be fun, none of it actually involves doing anything beyond clicking through text windows in different environments. You’ll occasionally run into a fellow roster member while out and about, and they might throw a story wrinkle up or challenge you to a match on one of AEW’s other weekly shows, but the whole thing left me constantly wanting more. Heck even the WWE titles on the Nintendo DS made workouts into simple little skill and timing based microgames!

There’s separate storylines here for the men’s and women’s divisions respectively, and I really like that losing matches doesn’t actually stop you from progressing to the next town and the next show. The fact that Fight Forever’s story mode presents a history of the company does go a long way to combat the inherent problem of feeling hugely dated which plagues every wrestling game by the time they launch too, so that’s something.

Destination ruh-roh

The creation tools for wrestlers and arenas are lackluster, providing about the level of depth you’d find in the N64 games Fight Forever pulls so much of its inspiration from. The way it entirely restricts you from combining many of the fairly small selection of outfit parts and objects together means that even people like me who never have the patience to go to the extreme depths the 2K’s tool sets have long been capable of will get frustrated quickly by constantly hitting limitations. Want your wrestler to wear glasses and a mouth-and-nose covering mask? Sorry, for no discernable reason you just can’t even though they exist in different assignable slots.

Fight Forever’s overall presentation is dragged down even further by the omission of some key licensed music tracks as well as the weird choice to make each character’s ring entrance remarkably short and completely lacking in pyrotechnics.

On my very first match I chose Ruby Soho versus Chris Jericho, as the game does welcomingly allow intergender bouts, and I was majorly disappointed when Ruby came out and bopped at the top of the entrance ramp for only around 9 seconds to some generic rock riffs and not to, you know, Ruby Soho by Rancid as she does on TV. When Jericho then stepped out next and his entrance stopped before the lyrics to Judas even began I started to seriously wonder if this was some pre-release issue and not a deliberate choice. I mean, his entrance tune is such an iconic fixture of AEW that live crowds will even insist upon singing it when the music isn’t played. Why would you not include this stuff when it’s such a key part of the show experience? Just baffling.

There’s no commentary during matches either which is a weird presentational choice, though the voices of AEW commentators Excalibur, Taz, and even good ol’ J.R. do feature here and there to introduce gameplay features and the like. They’re all a bit stiff and passionless sounding even in these brief moments though, so maybe the lack of actual ringside commentary from them is a mercy.

There’s a truly ridiculous amount of long-standing members of the AEW roster missing too. The Acclaimed, The Bunny, Brandon Cutler, Peter Avalon, Athena, Sonny Kiss, Shawn Spears, Jamie Hayter, Julia Hart, Hook, Mercedes Martinez, Wheeler Yuta, Kip Sabian, Evil Uno… the list goes on, and it’s pretty staggering. Some big names who joined the company a little bit later on have been announced for upcoming DLC, but again, this is a game selling itself as a AAA product to compete with WWE 2K, and the sheer amount of core company talent that’s been there since the very beginning who are just completely missing is absurd.

Every single thing in it is mid

I was able to spend a good deal of time with both the Switch and PC versions of Fight Forever during the review period. The Switch build is fine overall but character models do look pretty lo-fi on it. I did experience the occasional stutter and minor bug there that the PC edition seemed to be clear of also. None of it was enough for me to say that the Switch version is one to particularly steer clear of, but it really just bears the expected issue of a weaker running version that comes from weaker hardware.

AEW Fight Forever isn’t exactly a stupid idea from bad creative, it’s just a product scoped so small that asking a AAA new release price tag for it feels criminal. Matches are fun and entertaining, for a while at least, but absolutely every facet of the thing feels hugely undercooked. WWE 2K has been sorely in need of some real competition for years just as WWE itself has, but unfortunately AEW just haven’t pulled it off here as well as they did on television.

AEW Fight Forever is available from 29 June on Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, PS4, PS5 and Switch.

AEW Fight Forever was reviewed using promotional codes on Switch and PC, as provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.