AEW Fight Forever Review – Review
Should wrestling fans go All In, or do we still need a Switch wrestling Revolution?
The All Elite Wrestling promotion has had a lot of connections to video games since it officially opened in 2019. Of its four main founding wrestlers, one has a Triforce on his wrestling boots and has made Ocarina of Time references in promos, another has trademark moves called the “V-Trigger” and “One Winged Angel”, and the other two frequently find their matches compared to video games. The second event in the company’s history even coincided with the 2019 CEO fighting game tournament. So it’s no shock that they worked for a long time to make sure their debut in the gaming ring was “just right”, even having it developed by Yukes (developers of WWE games previously) and encouraging the signing of former talent from the studio formerly known as AKI. Their first result is certainly LE CHAMPION as far as Switch wrestling games go, but is that enough to make it a five-star classic for the platform?
The default roster of the game runs about 45 deep, and a lot of the company’s biggest names (such as Jon “Dean Ambrose” Moxley, Chris Jericho, and Dr. Britt Baker) are included; but there’s a lot of talent that has come up through the company in the last year or so that aren’t represented – either in the roster as shipped or in the game’s DLC. (There’s a separate pack for two forms of Matt Freaking Hardy, and the pass will drop six wrestlers over the next couple of months including ace tag team FTR and one of their future stars “Hook”.) I would love to set up matches with the popular tag team The Acclaimed, or build out the current Blackpool Combat Club stable but don’t have access to half of it by default. The women’s roster is also somewhat sparsely represented; the company’s last two women’s world champions as of the game’s release (Jaime Hayter and Toni Storm) aren’t in the shipping roster.
The Custom Wrestler option does help to alleviate some of the deficiencies of the roster, though I would have appreciated an option to download edits if the game is going to be as heavy in the online as it was. After figuring out some of the oddities with the setup – like having to select a face in order to get the option to modify the chosen wrestler’s skin tone – it was easy to put together a freaky custom wrestler based on an old Jon Bois column.
I haven’t played an AKI wrestling game in nearly two decades at this point, but aside from one-off things like switching focus in multi-competitor matches I was pretty much off and grappling in a couple of matches. The game works on a similar “strike or grapple” system to what you would see in No Mercy, complete with “weak” and “strong” grapples unlocking different levels of damaging moves, though there are dedicated counter buttons for striking and grappling as was later seen in the WWE series, as well as dedicated punch and kick buttons. Where a problem happened was actually in the creator, specifically when it was time to determine BEEFTANK’s “finishing maneuver”. There was no option to filter moves to just a specific type, so moves off the top rope were mixed in with strikes and the moves I wanted to use as a match ender. Before you ask why that’s an issue, the wrestler in question is 5’2” tall and weighs 400 lbs. He should be going to the top rope… never.
Once the controls are mastered and the wrestler built, the primary way of building their stats is the game’s story mode called “Road To Elite”. It’s a branching storyline with the odd dialogue choice which sets you down particular paths depending on whether you choose to be a good guy or bad guy, and at least with the paths BEEFTANK took I ended up seeing most of the game’s specialty matches – the “Casino Battle Royale” started it off, I had a few tag team matches, and somehow ended up in a “Lights Out” (no disqualification) match and an Exploding Barbed Wire Rope deathmatch. Although set against a “year” in the company, since their pay-per-view or “premium” events are only run quarterly it’s actually not as long as it would seem at first blush. You travel around North America (or the United States and Toronto, no I’m not bitter about this, why do you ask) and have the option to do tasks to build stamina/match momentum/stats leading up to the company’s weekly “Dynamite” TV show. Eventually, the option to participate in matches on the now-cancelled YouTube show “AEW Dark” and what is now the company’s “C show” Rampage unlock; presumably a follow-up will include the newly launched Collision show. After three weeks of this with some story, the “blowoff” to the story happens at the pay-per-view, and the cycle repeats until you reach the Memorial Day weekend show “Double or Nothing”. Each match earns “skill points” and “AEW Cash” that can be used to respectively buff the created character and unlock new tools for creation as well as a couple of bonus playable characters (the game’s sole referee Aubrey Edwards and company co-founder Cody Rhodes, who left the promotion in early 2022 to return to World Wrestling Entertainment and was last seen appearing in the ring with a rubber chicken at Wtestlemania XXXIX.) One of the most enjoyable parts of the mode was video clips that had footage from the company’s history for additional context – I managed to see the formation of the “Death Triangle” stable, the famous August 2021 debut of former champion CM Punk on a live edition of Rampage, and the original Exploding Barbed Wire Deathmatch from March 2021.
For whatever reason, a series of minigames are included in the game which wouldn’t be out of place in Mario Party, and are also an option to use time in Road to Elite. These include a “chip dropping” game, a memory game, and a trivia quiz about company history; the DLC also includes new games. The chip-dropping game was a bit much – at one point, nearly 90% of the ring is taken up by bombs – but the other ones are basic time wasters if you already have full stats in Road to Elite and want to pick up some extra cash or skills. Points and cash can also be earned by taking on various daily and weekly challenges, which usually involve winning matches on a specific difficulty or with a specific wrestler.
A common challenge involves using the game’s online modes – the netcode held up well enough when I tried it, but the Switch screamed at me constantly to turn off airplane mode when I activated it to see if playing offline was possible. It is, but it will be a bit annoying. One major technical issue that I suspect is only present on Switch but sadly couldn’t check for occurrence on other hardware was a constant frame skip. As an example I might throw a haymaker punch with BEEFTANK, and it would go from the arm being down at his side to in mid-swing with a clear jump ahead in the animation. This was especially common in three-person matches, tag matches, and basically any time there were more than three people in the ring at once (two wrestlers and Aubrey). Loading wasn’t too bad when I played docked, but it was a bit more frequent when playing handheld. There was also the odd instance where a spoken line (by Hall of Fame commentator Jim Ross) didn’t match the subtitles, though Ross is known among AEW fans as having “lost a mile per hour on his fastball” due to his age so I’m not sure if that’s a game problem or if a new commentator will be needed soon.
There’s no question in my mind that AEW’s game debut is the best wrestling game we’ve had on a Nintendo console in more than a decade. But as a multiplatform game, the Switch is clearly struggling to handle it, which is odd as THQ Nordic ports on Switch tend to run on par with their counterparts on other consoles. Hopefully this isn’t an annual release and it gets some post launch support to clean things up, because as of now it didn’t meet the pre-launch goal of being a WWF No Mercy killer. It’s more of a WCW/nWo World Tour – a good first effort with potential to be a classic, but it needs a bit more work.
