AEW: Fight Forever review: "Every wrestling fan needs to play it"

Breathless. It's a word used to summarize some of the best finishes in wrestling history, and it's the most appropriate one I can find to convey AEW Fight Forever's combustible mix of OTT moves and weapon-packed mayhem. Punch, kick, kick, punch, grapple, slam, pin, kickout, repeat to fade: there is very little time to think in this arcade-inspired brawler. It's all the better for it.

Developer Yuke's spent 20 years making the predecessors to WWE 2K23, so you'd expect AEW Fight Forever to be a realism-based, slow-burning sim. Instead, it's the opposite – and that shock U-turn is a masterstroke. Borrowing heavily from classics such as No Mercy and Fire Pro, this is to the WWE series what Wardlow is to AJ Styles. Everything is big, bold, brash, and a bit daft.

There's little to worry about aside from building your momentum bar to earn signatures and finishers. Those punches and kicks are a key focus, while grapples depend on timing your grab before an opponent's. You need to keep half an eye on body-part damage, but this is a brawler that prioritizes attack over defense. Finishers land with emphatic oomph, from Jade Cargill's face-planting Jaded, to CM Punk's skull-cracking GTS, to Kenny Omega's shoulder-wrecking One-Winged Angel.

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All Out Chaos

There's little to worry about aside from building your momentum bar to earn signatures and finishers. Those punches and kicks are a key focus, while grapples depend on timing your grab before an opponent's. You need to keep half an eye on body-part damage, but this is a brawler that prioritizes attack over defense. Finishers land with emphatic oomph, from Jade Cargill's face-planting Jaded, to CM Punk's skull-cracking GTS, to Kenny Omega's shoulder-wrecking One-Winged Angel.

Movement can be janky, and the lack of commentary is disappointing – but it's still so much fun to muck around. Hilarious weapons include a sprayable fire extinguisher, and rideable skateboard. There are football helmets, and golf clubs, and thumb tacks, and flaming tables. Exploding barbed wire death matches raise the stakes even higher with yet more fire, gallons of blood, and moments that leave you whooping, or laughing, or both. Honestly, just writing all this makes me want to close the laptop and play it again, right now.

Fight Forever lacks many of WWE 2K23's subtleties, yet there are authentic wrestling bits it does better. For instance, team-mate AI is streets ahead of its big-budget rival. Following a tag, matches briefly devolve into four-way brawls as each tandem looks to gain an advantage. Even better, go for a pin and your buddy immediately leaps into the ring to prevent it being broken up – a godsend when compared to 2K23, where it's almost impossible to conclude eight-man tags as opponents race through the ropes while your buddies freeze on the apron, gormless.

Chasing The Elite

AEW Fight Forever is equipped with a Road To Elite career mode, and again, it's a lot of fun. Split across a calendar year, you play in four-week blocks, each building up to a PPV. Within each week you can select one activity, such as going to the gym, sightseeing, or eating out. These affect your character in different ways: sightseeing increases momentum, while eating out replenishes energy – and, bizarrely, lets you experience a local delicacy. It's a cute touch. As are hilarious Mario Party-style mini-games such as Penta Says, in which you try to button-match the luchador's dance moves, or the self explanatory AEW Pop Quiz. Clearly at least one member of the dev team was a Virtua Tennis aficionado, and that person deserves a gold star.

Some of these activities see you bump into a fellow member of the roster, and take a photograph – which then gets stored in your Snapshots folder. I finished my first playthrough, as Wardlow, in three hours, but found myself immediately driven to try a second as Baker in order to rack up different pics. Whether that'll remain the case after six or seven playthroughs I can't say just yet, but for now it's a neat way of teasing longevity.

Not that I'm experiencing any boredom. There are three different storyline paths to each pay-per-view, and they're all engaging and unique. In one, Brodie Lee and John Silver sought to recruit Wardlow as a member of the Dark Order, while Baker became embroiled in Chris Jericho and MJF's battle to lead the Inner Circle. Cut-scenes are neatly interspersed with footage of the real-life AEW events which inspired each story, such as CM Punk's debut on Rampage. It's all immersive and, thanks to its structure, fast-moving too.

Beyond Road To Elite, there are no long-term modes on offer here – and that's Fight Forever's looming question mark. Once you've powered through it countless times over a two-month period, are those explosive exhibition matches going to be enough to keep you coming back? Maybe yes, maybe no, particularly with some match types (handicap, four-way ladder bouts) only playable in career mode, and the curiously limited AEW Fight Forever roster. Even with DLC, the number of playable stars falls short of 60, and there's no way of importing created wrestlers in the same manner as WWE 2K23 CAWs. That's a concern.

Costly Extras

If there's one area of AEW Fight Forever that doesn't sit right, it's how Yuke’s and THQ Nordic has approached downloadable content. The roster arrives without longtime AEW superstars like Matt Hardy and FTR – unless you're willing to pay extra. It's a baffling decision, and one which dilutes the free-spirited fun that is otherwise present across Fight Forever – with the package otherwise feeling like one big celebration of the AEW. Compounding these issues with the roster in the absence of some current champs – such as Toni Storm, Buddy Matthews, and Brody King – who have been omitted entirely.

Let's not let those decisions taint a highly promising debut, though. AEW Fight Forever's brash, bold arrival means that for the first time in two decades we have a pair of top-tier, yet markedly different, squared-circle offerings to choose from on console. Every wrestling fan needs to play it. With a bigger roster, and expanded creation-sharing options, this hilarious one-off could very easily turn into an annual colossus.

AEW Fight Forever was reviewed on PS5 with a code provided by the publisher.