The development of AEW: Fight Forever is an interesting tale. Yukes are the former developers of the WWE games, creating a staggering amount of wrestling titles over the years under several publishers. That includes releasing at least one WWE/WWF game per year from 2000-2018. But in 2019, 2K Sports announced it was shifting the WWE license away from Yukes and over to Visual Concepts. Earlier that year, Yukes had implied some tension between their company and 2K, and announced plans to develop a new wrestling IP in order to reinvigorate its staff. As a result, Yukes and 2K parted ways.

That’s where All Elite Wrestling came into the mix. After Cody Rhodes and the Young Bucks managed to hold the biggest wrestling event not affiliated with WWE or WCW since 1993. Tony Khan brought the money, and together the group managed to secure a TV deal and sign some incredible wrestling talents, including avid gamer Kenny Omega. in 2019, the first PPV aired on TV, and by 2020 the company announced plans for a videogame developed by none other than Yukes, with Kenny Omega being heavily involved and THQ Nordic acting as the publisher.

In such a short time, AEW has done incredibly well by managing to quickly gain a TV presence and a loyal fanbase. It has issues and certainly can’t compete with the WWE directly, at least not yet, but it’s an excellent alternative to the product that the WWE puts out every week. AEW is the underdog company that wants to grow and fight, and Fight Forever is the company in a nutshell: lacking the polish and the glitz and the budget of the biggest wrestling company in the world, but sure as fuck not lacking the spirit and the passion.

AEW: Fight Forever goes the other way with a far more arcade feel to its wrestling, one that’s very much inspired by WWF: No Mercy which both the developers and Kenny Omega cite. While it never goes as completely crazy as something like WWE All-Stars, there’s a nice sense of exagerrated impact to all that moves in Fight Forever that makes everything feel dangerous. When you spike someone on their head with a piledriver or deliver a chokeslam, the ring bounces, there’s a pleasing thud and the hapless victim looks like he or she has been murdered. It’s great.

Executing all the various moves is kept simple, to the point where even button-mashers should be able to jump into a match and pull of a few cool moves. Kicks and punches can be mixed into simple 2 or 3 hit combos, and the buttons can be held for more powerful versions. Grapples also come in regular or more powerful flavours and are executed by locking up with an opponent then hitting a face button combined with a direction on the stick.

Pulling off a signature move or finisher is simple as well: signatures are mapped to the Dpad, and finishers are done using the right stick. Both get accessed by building up the momentum bar by succesfully smacking the shit out of your opponent, and that same bar also dictates how easy it is to pin or submit a wrestler. I really love how you can smoothly transition into a finisher just by pushing the stick, too, instead of always having to lock up with an opponent first. Some of the finishing moves even let you move straight into a pin to make the action smoother.

That’s the basic gist, but obviously it does get more complicated than that. Grapples and strikes can be blocked using the shoulder buttons and moves can be countered, though the timing is nebulous at best. Springboard attacks, ground moves, Irish whips and pretty much every other form of offense is easily executed using a control scheme that feels a little crowded sometimes but that does the job.

Admittedly, the game isn’t great at explaining some of it. On the one hand, it’s great to see the old-school approach of just trying stuff return to a wrestling game. A lot of the coolest moments in AEW: Fight Forever came from me messing around and discovering something I didn’t know I could do. But on the other hand, it could do with properly explaining a couple of the more foundational skills, like mentioning that you can pick up an opponent with the shoulder button or showing players how to get an opponent up on the turnbuckle.

There is an obvious input lag that stops the action feeling as fluid as it could, too, but that didn’t stop me from having a blast in the actual matches. It gets even better when the weapons come into play. There’s plenty of them, including a bag of thumbtacks that can be dropped onto the floor. At one point, in a no DQ match I suplexed someone through a table onto thumbtacks and for a brief moment it felt like I had created one of those insane, holy-shit moments from a hardcore wrestling show that makes you question your life choices. You can even ride around on Darby Allin’s skateboard. There’s still work to be done – like how kicking out of a pin is currently damn-near impossible – but in terms of gameplay, AEW: Fight Forever is very enjoyable, and excels when you get a few friends round for a match.

In the run up to AEW: Fighter Forever’s launch, Yukes and Kenny Omega made a valiant attempt to keep expectations in check. They talked about how they could not and would not try to compete with the WWE 2K games in terms of raw content. That’s fair, because the WWE games are annualised and can keep piling on more and more content, whereas right now Yukes are starting with the foundations.

So yeah, Fight Forever is rather anaemic when it comes to…well, everything, really. It’s most noticeable in its custom wrestler mode. The WWE games boast such an extensive array of options that its possible to recreate just about any wrestler from around the world, from their looks to their move set. While it’s unfair to expect such things from AEW, the selection that Fight Forever has is very, very basic. A handful of faces for both male and female wrestlers and a limited selection of attire means custom wrestlers look generic, and you certainly can’t make anything resembling non-AEW characters.

At least the selection of moves is quite good, letting you create something unique for your custom character or recreate the moveset of your favourite wrestler.

There’s the option to build a custom arena as well but that suffers from the same dirth of options. And you can make a tag-team, if you want, even choosing their special tandem finishers.

The lack of budget is most easily seen in the graphics. Yukes went with a stylised look that I really like and which suits the more arcade nature of the wrestling, but on a technical level Fight Forever looks a few generations behind. Some of the roster look terrible, like Chris Jericho and Eddie Kingston, to the point where some of them barely resemble their real-life counterparts. Others are a little better, but at no point could this be called a good looking game.

The roster spans nearly 50 of AEW’s best stars, including the likes of CM Punk, MJF, Kenny Omega, Darby Allin, Sting, Jon Moxley, Britt Baker, the Young Bucks and so many more making the cut. And I was super pleased to see Brodie Lee, too, who sadly passed away several years ago and to whom AEW continues to reference and pay tribute to. His inclusion feels like a terrific way of keeping the man’s wrestling legacy alive and well.

However, the roster does have a few weird exceptions. Tag-team FTR are day-one DLC, for example, while guys like Samoa Joe and Keith Lee are completely absent. Other characters also have older gimmicks, like Wardlow still acting as MJF’s personal bodyguard. Malakai Black doesn’t have his two House of Black stablemates, and over on the female side of the ring, current women’s champ Toni Storm is missing along with the previous champion Jamie Hayter. Some of these can probably be put down to timing, like the House of Black’s Brodie King debuting at the start of 2022 and Toni Storm appearing in March of the same year, but Hayter has been with AEW since 2021 and has fought for the title before. And CM Punk made the cut despite a huge controversy which resulted in him being away from the company for 9 months before returning quite recently.

Of course, a lot of this comes down to wrestlers being kept back for DLC. The Acclaimed are a prime example, as is Hook and the insane Danhausen. While it’s a shame not to see the complete roster available on day one, it is understandable that at least some would be kept back. Planned seasonal content will help bolster the roster.

While the game’s official website says that every wrestler has the correct intro music, that’s not quite the case. Jon Moxley doesn’t come to the ring while Wild Thing blares in the background, for example, and Orange Cassidy doesn’t get Jane by Starship Jefferson. Some of this may come to licensing issues, but that doesn’t stop it from being a little disappointing.

To me, entrances are one of the biggest and most entertaining parts of wrestling. Sometimes it can be taken a little too far, but for the most part entrances are a quick and easy way for a wrestler to establish who they are and what they are about. So man, was I disappointed with AEW: Fight Forever. Instead of wrestler’s getting their full walk to the ring, they get around 10 seconds of footage, barely enough time for CM Punk’s awesome Cult of Personality theme to get started. It really neuters some of the cooler character’s, too, whose grandiose entrances are a big part of their mystique. Malakai Black is a prime example, his usual entrance consisting of the lights cutting out and him appearing in the ring, sitting cross-legged. In the game, he’s just on stage, sitting cross-legged instead.

AEW: Fight Forever only supports four wrestlers at any given time in a match, which causes a couple of issues. First, despite AEW featuring a Trios Championship division spearheaded by the likes of The Death Triangle, there’s no Trios matches in the game. It also means developer Yukes had to heavy modify the Casino Battle Royale match type where a new entrant would normally enter the fray every 90 seconds. Fight Forever changes this so that a wrestler only enters when another is eliminated, ensuring only four characters are ever in the ring.

Battling multiple opponents can be cumbersome, too, because there’s no indicator showing which wrestler your targeting. Instead, your character will look at the opponent you are focusing on, but when a couple of wrestlers are grouped together it’s difficult to ensure you are aiming at the the one you want. Turning on manual targeting, which works based pushing the movement stick toward your intended victim, helps a little bit but doesn’t solve the issue.

In fact, a lack of indicators is a niggle throughout the game. There’s nothing telling you whether your button mashing is close to getting you out a of a pin or submission, for example, nor any indication of when you can counter something.

Road to Elite is the primary singleplayer mode in the game, letting you take a custom wrestler or AEW star through a year of AEW action. Your journey to the top begins with a phone call from Tony Khan, the money behind AEW: he wants you as an entrant into the Casino Battle Royale where the winner will get a shot at becoming the inaugural AEW World Champion. The low-budget nature of Fight Forever is immediately apparent in this segment, from the cheesy background music to the empty gym behind you. Still, it’s a decent starting point, even if being in a Royale is a confusing place to learn the controls.

From there the game breaks it down into four blocks, each one featuring a mini-storyline culminating in a PPV. Each block has three possible storylines that are chosen from at random, with the exception of the first block where winning or losing the Royale determines whether you fight for the AEW Championship or the tag-team belts.

Between each episode of Dynamite leading up to that block’s PPV, you get a chance to do a couple of things. Hitting the gym earns extra skill points that can be invested into your custom character, buffing up their Finisher strength or unlocking useful new abilities like springboard attacks, being able to counter dives and more. Unfortunately, stock AEW wrestlers can’t do any of that, making skill points useless if you opt to go through Road to Elite with the likes of Kenny Omega or Bryan Danielson. In other words, there’s a strong sense that Road to Elite is primarily aimed at custom wrestlers so that they can have their stats boosted up for Exhibition mode.

Working out and competing in matches drains your energy and potentially even your mood, so going out dining, attending press events and sightseeing are all ways to regenerated both stats. You might even bump into other wrestlers who ask for a selfie. These moments would have been a good time to flesh out all the other wrestlers with some sharp writing, especially helpful for anybody a little less familiar with the AEW roster. Sadly, that’s not the case. In fact, the writing is atrocious and character’s don’t come across anything like their real-life inspirations.

It’s also filled with storylines and moments that go absolutely nowhere. At one point, I entered into a tag-team with Dustin Rhodes and we won the Tag-Team titles in the span of just a few weeks. It turns out as a joke Dustin had been stealing my luggage which is why I wound up wrestling in street clothes. My character, without any input from me, decides to superkick Dustin in the face, and then the story just ends. That’s it. The game never bothers to address what happens to the Tag-Team titles, and the career screen lists me as still being a Tag-team champ. So I guess me and Dustin still hold the belts?

There are a lot of examples like this where storylines don’t go anywhere, end suddenly or don’t have any real explanation. I became the first-ever AEW World Champion, but my character didn’t wear the belt until the very final match in career mode, and my status as the champ was never brought up. The Death Triangle wanted me as a new member and I was given a choice: join up or turn them down. It doesn’t matter, though, because whatever you choose they turn on you without an explanation. Then you have a match where all three of them get involved. Whether you win or lose, the story is over. And at no point is any justification given for what’s going on.

Nor does the game do the stacked AEW roster any justice. MJF is their top heel and a charismatic asshole on the microphone, yet in his feud there are no awesome promos that capture his acid tongue. Your own character spouts generic lines and engages in storylines with absolutely no input from you, like delivering that superkick to poor Dustin’s face. And other major parts of AEW like Darby appear briefly and then vanish.

The mode is short, though, which I think is for the best. The goal was clearly to give it some decent replay value, as shown by one of the Playstation trophies requiring ten playthroughs of career mode to get. After a couple of runs, however, I was pretty tired of chasing belts. It didn’t help that I kept getting the same storylines, too.

Outside of Road to Elite you can take your wrestling talents online or into exhibition matches against the computer. Either way there’s a small selection of match types to pick from: singles, tag-team, 3-way, 4-way, ladder, casino battle royale, falls count anywhere, unsanctioned lights out and the infamous exploding barbed wire death match which Kenny Omega and Jon Moxley took part in last year. That last match type is the obvious highlight and is heaps of stupid fun.

AEW: Fight Forever is far from a perfect wrestling game, exhibiting a lot of rough edges, just like AEW itself. But then, AEW is still a relatively new kid on the block attempting to go toe-to-toe with the biggest wrestling company in the world, and its game is reflective of that. Yukes may be a veteran in the wrestling game business but its starting from the bottom and trying to compete against the established and long-running WWE games which have the luxury of years of content.

To put it simply, I think AEW: Fight Forever is a good start for Yukes to build upon, whether that’s through iterative sequels or as a long-term platform. The core wrestling is a lot of fun, accessible and captures the bombastic nature of the sport in a way that the WWE games don’t. It’s a smart move because it means AEW: Fight Forever positions itself as an alternative rather than a direct competitor. If Yukes can start adding a lot more content to the wrestler creation systems and flesh out the Road to Elite mode, this could be a winner.