AEW: Fight Forever - The Final Preview

ign.com:

When it launched in 2019, All Elite Wrestling emerged as an alternative to the mainstream of Professional Wrestling – a genre of sports entertainment that had mostly run without substantial competition in the US for decades. Its upcoming game, AEW Fight Forever, largely finds itself in the same position. It’s an arcadey and old school alternative to the more realistic and simulation focused WWE 2K series, and on that front, it succeeds at what it sets out to do. Based on about two hours of playtime with a pre-release build, Fight Forever is the kind of simple pick-up-and-play fun that wrestling games used to be, even if it is a bit rough around the edges.

I got to play Fight Forever at Gamescom last year as well, which you can read all about here. My thoughts largely haven’t changed since then, even though I’ve gotten to play with a bunch more wrestlers, more match types, on a more polished build. What impressed me this time around though were all of the small touches that really make each individual wrestler come to life. One of the issues that inevitably affects all wrestling games is that many of the wrestlers feel very samey, largely because they all pull moves from the same humongous pool of maneuvers. But Fight Forever has a number of really nice small touches that go a long way into making the characters feel unique.

As an example, most characters are able to perform a quick evade by double tapping the left stick in a direction. However, MJF can not do this. Instead, when you double tap to evade0, he goes down on his knees and starts to beg for his life, which you can then quickly cancel into an attack to try and catch your opponent off guard. It’s very MJF-like, and I got a real kick out of it every time I managed