Whenever a company tries to make its first video game, there is always a lot of pressure on them to make it as good as it can be. After all, it’s their “first impression,” and we all know you can’t get a second chance to make a good impression. For All Elite Wrestling they’ve spent the last four years trying to make a good first impression with every major step forward they take. More times than not, they have made that good impression, but there have been stumbling blocks. Their first-ever console/PC video game, AEW Fight Forever, is coming out tomorrow, and the review is out for it. So did it make a good first impression?
Well, it depends on who you ask. On Metacritic, the PS5 version of the title has a 64 score. While that’s technically not a bad score, it’s also not technically a good one. If anything, it’s somewhere in the middle between average and good.
When you look at the reviews, you can see some positive notes throughout every review. For example, they praise the game for being accessible to all and having controls that make it easy and fun to play more times than not. They praise the “return to old-school style wrestling games,” which was the goal for the team at Yukes and AEW Games from the start. Some appreciated the “fun and breezy” way you can get through the game too.
However, when you look at the reviews as a whole, you’ll notice that they also say similar things in the negative sense. For example, they critique the “rough” visuals, which have been a consistent thread online with each new video shown for the game.
They also felt that the game was missing some key content that would help push it over the top to make it better. The story mode is also a “mixed bag” of sorts, and many reviews harped on it being flimsy and not fleshed out like videos for the mode promised it would be.
All in all, AEW Fight Forever felt like a game with “unrealized potential,” as one review put it. It’s not a bad game, and you can tell what the teams behind it were going for, but they couldn’t realize everything they could’ve done.
Depending on game sales, the teams could work on a sequel. But, one of the AEW wrestlers said the plan is to simply add to the game over the course of years. So perhaps an update patch will help remedy some of the issues.
