AEW came out of the gate swinging with a massive amount of support from professional wrestling fans. The company’s aim to be a competitor/an alternative to WWE has been viewed as a victory for the business. So naturally they set their sights on the lucrative world of video games. After several delays Fight Forever finally arrived in June and unfortunately the delays were foreshadowing for a disappointing experience. WWE 2K23 released stuffed with content in a mostly successful effort to cover its technical shortcomings. Fight Forever doesn’t do nearly enough to distract from its much worse limitations.

Simplified controls and a story mode that can branch off in several directions attempt to harken back to the glory days of games like WWF No Mercy or SmackDown! Here Comes the Pain. Being able to switch camera angles and activate pyro at any point during a wrestler’s entrance is pretty neat, even if the entrances themselves are puzzlingly short clips that only last a few seconds. The variety of match types with additions such as the ridiculous Exploding Barbed Wire Deathmatch (based on the very awful one between Jon Moxley and Kenny Omega) is surprising. On the surface it all seems like a wrestling game that’s trying to be just that: a straightforward, old-fashioned pro wrestling video game.

Yet it all has a very “one step forward, two steps back” feel to it. The aforementioned story mode, called Road to Elite, changes based on what the player does, but it’s very quickly obvious how limited and poorly written it is (some of the cutscenes are agonizingly cringy). It’s short, which in turn means the replay value is low because of how little it actually offers. The creation modes are very sparse, offering less customization than games from the 90s did. The roster is a headscratcher, lacking several AEW stars who would seem like shoo-ins but featuring the likes of Cody Rhodes who hadn’t been in AEW for over a year at the time of the game’s release. The plethora of mini games are bad across the board, not to mention a confusing thing for Yuke’s to have spent time and resources on.

Perhaps some or all of that could be excused or at least taken in stride if the gameplay wasn’t smothered by unresponsiveness. The controls are sluggish and the collision detection is poor. Hits or grapples often simply don’t connect, which makes playing the game on a harder difficulty a nightmare. Also, a thing that isn’t unique to this game (it has plagued WWE games for a little while now) but still annoyed me is the amount of rope breaks registered to the point where it seems as if you have to pin or submit an opponent in the dead center of the ring. If a body part isn’t under or touching a rope it shouldn’t count as a rope break!!!

It’s a shame to see AEW’s first swing at a major wrestling game fall short because the good ideas are frustratingly noticeable. I believe they can and will improve upon what Fight Forever attempts with future iterations. But when stacked up against their major rival in the year of Luigi 2023, AEW has lost the gaming battle to WWE. Tony Khan would probably say they aren’t competing, but this is my review dammit.

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Note: I haven’t played the Stadium Stampede mode and probably won’t get a chance to anytime soon.