The game is pretty great. It plays like the old AKI styled game kinda an in between of No Mercy and Def Jam. There is a ton of room for improvement when it comes to match modes and general options.

But for the base core gameplay it is great. I've been waiting years for this type of arcade wrestling game.

One thing they did correct was make characters feel pretty different from each other. I'm hoping for quality of life improvements.

Ok so after giving this a go, I can say that this game is actually pretty damn decent. Don't get me wrong, it has a few problems but it definitely has room to grow.

The matches are great, the gameplay is fun and the controls are quite simple once you get used to them. My only issue with the controls is the timing with reversals and the time it takes to master them.

The roster's pretty solid but they are missing a few stars. And 3v3 would have been nice too.

The matches are great but Casino Battle Royale is very disappointing due to the AI taking forever eliminating people and the match only allowing 4 people in the ring at a time. Shame. But Exploding Barbed Wire Deathmatch is so much fun I love it! (And it has better explosions than the actual fucking match!)

The creative suite however is the most disappointing aspect. It is so limited and CAW's are gonna look so bland due to the lack of parts. It's a big let down.

Road to Elite is quite fun. I love a good season mode in wrestling games and Road to Elite is a welcome mode for that.

Overall, this game is ok. With a bit of polishing and more matches, it can grow into a great game in time. Let's hope they do that because it has a lot of potential.

Welcome back, Yukes. We missed ya.

Now, I'm a big wrestling fan. I grew up in the 90s watching every WWF broadcast on cable and every ECW tape I could get my hands on. Today, I love everything from the smallest indie promotions to brands like DDT, GCPW, New Japan, WWE, and AEW. As a child of the Attitude Era, I also had my own standard-issue copy of No Mercy for the N64.

Surely, this game should be catnip for someone like me.

This just isn't the case.

Look, I appreciate that THQ produced this game and that you have the same storytelling system as No Mercy. But, when the first thing you see is a bad Unity render of Kenny Omega—one of the company's executive vice presidents, mind you—it acts as a harbinger of what's to come from the game. Everything just feels either a bit off or a bit empty in the game.

Any mode outside of a one-on-one competition is a nightmare in terms of gameplay mechanics. 2K Games has figured out the flow of televised American professional wrestling matches thanks to its annual obligation to the WWE. Fight Forever, on the other hand, thinks a fun tag team match means the unlimited ability to burn your tag (or the ability to interrupt a pinfall attempt once as the non-legal partner). Four-way matches also become a grind in this way but also because there isn't a ring-out stamina meter for fatigued opponents.

My main focus was the gameplay and I did have some fun playing the game, but there were little notions nagging at me while playing, such as:

- The Unity Engine has rendering and loading difficulties for no real apparent reason.
- The creation suite is paltry.
- The roster has changed so much from June that the CM Punk portion of the Road to Elite has become a slice of accidental comedy.
- Not including the trademarked themes for the wrestlers when the budget for the game has already ballooned to a reported $10 million.
- Match ratings based on something that is never made apparent. A match with three A's will receive a B overall and 2 stars. What does that even mean?

I don't know. I did have fun at first until everything became apparent. Instead of thinking of this as a reflection of AEW's failures, hopefully, it can be seen in the future as an indication of its growing pains.

I was very excited for this because we finally have different choices in wrestling games but this in particular feels a little disappointing. Gameplay wise it’s pretty fun, reversing is the one thing I really don’t like though.

Game mode wise, there are a lot of match types which make it fun but the road to elite mode is VERY bare bones which isn’t a terrible thing but I wasn’t really impressed with a lot of the story that I saw. Went through the mode twice and don’t really feel like I want to play it again even if there are a few unlockable characters I haven’t gotten yet.

I think this game has its place and that’s as a fun arcadey wrestling game that you pick up and play at a party or get together. If I want something more realistic I’ll go to 2K23. Gameplay is what saved the game for me, but they really need to add some more content to this.

At its core AEW Fight Forever is a fun game. They nailed the core gameplay and atmosphere of AEW but they fell short nearly everywhere else. There's still a lot of fun to be had, but it's hard to ignore just how much wasn't very good as well.

The create a wrestler is the most bare bones I've ever seen in any wrestling game, and this I'd a HUGE part of wrestling games. The career mode was fun for awhile but overall lackluster and hindered by the fact that I just couldn't like the character I created.

Overall there's a fun game here with a ton of room for improvement. I quite like playing the game but it's missing so much of what it needs to be a great wrestling game.

I really wanted to like this game, and although it can be fun to mess around in once you get a hold of the controls, it's not very good. The create-a-wrestler mode in this game is AWFUL. It is just absolutely terrible! We've been spoiled so much by the in-depth creation suites in the WWE 2K games that in comparison Fight Forever's looks like an absolute joke. The career mode is beyond repetitive and I was bored within the first 20 minutes. Beyond that, the DLC's are ridiculously overpriced.

I hope this game can be a learning experience for the team because there is a foundation of something good here, but this just isn't what I'd hoped for.

For personal reference more than anything else.

First time trying it out, played for 45-60 mins maybe?

I felt like I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into with this game, I'd seen some gameplay and heard some stuff from fans. I knew it was lacking in content and could see that it was going for a kind of light-hearted tone. Despite all this I was still pretty excited to give it a go.

There is still a part of me that thinks I was playing a demo version or something, this is barebones in a way I can't even believe. The miniscule amount of match types, CAW stuff and even options was kind of insulting, even having got this game through PS Plus, I couldn't even begin to imagine how I'd feel if I paid full price for it. There are like less than ten match types overall, including the same matches but with a different amount of wrestlers. The CAW stuff is pretty simple when it comes to actually creating your wrestler which I partially didn't mind, but the attire, hair and all that shit has so little to choose from, it becomes worse when a lot of the options feel indistinguishable from one another. As for options, I don't even get it, I couldn't find a way to turn entrances off and adjusting the overall rules of matches just didn't seem to be a thing in the options, things like these feel necessary for these types of games.

As for the gameplay its just kind of weak and weirdly confusing? It doesn't feel bad by any stretch of the imagination but its certainly not good either. What you can actually do in a match feels limited. You have to mash buttons to escape a pin which is annoying and something I didn't really like about the older wrestling games. I think the way signatures and finishers work is just strange. Matches feel kind of boring or finish too quickly. They also have a star rating that seems to only show after a match as opposed to being there throughout the match like some of the more recent WWE games and I think I prefer being able to see it during a match so I feel like I have a goal to work towards or something.

I don't really get this game, apparently its trying to emulate older WWE games like No Mercy but the oldest one I ever played was Here Comes the Pain and not for particularly long either. But the thing to me at least is if I was looking to just play a normal wrestling game I'd play one of the newer WWE ones and if I wanted something more out there that's less serious then I'd either try to get my hands on an older WWE game or play one of MDickie's games, as they actually feel like they go the whole mile in the weirdness and fun aspect. This game doesn't feel good to play which is a big issue but besides that its too serious to be a silly game and too silly to be a serious one, it just feels confused.

I also had a number of problems with this game, I started off doing the training mode as I thought it would teach me how to play the game (lol) and when it didn't, I just tried to learn from the move list and controls in the pause menu, just to then go and play a 1v1 match where it taught me how to do a couple of the more complicated things in the game. I then played a 4-man match, then when that was done I did another 1v1 match just for the game to give me a tutorial on how to actually play the game and do basic attacks. I also had an instance where, during an entrance above a wrestler's name it said something like (Insert Text about Wrestler Here) and I thought it was a glitch but I then reconsidered as I know the wrestler in question is a pretty jokey one, just for me to play another match with him after and the actual text that was supposed to go there showed up. There seemed to be a couple of other things and I feel like if I play it more then there'll be a bunch more glitches or whatever, but this was what stuck out.

This is pretty bad, I think I had a higher opinion of it before I played it and it made more sense to me then, having actually played it now its just weird and I don't really see the point in it. Perhaps they can do something with it or get it right on a second try but for now this is just bad and I can think of a lot more wrestling games I would rather play.