AEW Fight Forever – A Much Needed Alternative to the Mainstream – gamescom 2022

The momentum system also returns in exactly the same fashion, with a colored momentum meter that builds from green, to yellow, to orange, to bright red as you land moves; and depletes as you take hits, going all the way down to blue. When your momentum meter is full, you can execute one of your signature moves by pressing the d-pad in a direction after landing a grapple, or you could taunt, and gain access to your finisher. From there you have a limited amount of time to hit your finishing move before the momentum meter goes back to green.

There’s a great tension that sets in once a character has a finisher in the chamber, as the player with the finisher is looking to land it as quick as they can, while the person on defense is looking for a last ditch effort to try and counter it, because if they do, they steal the momentum and gain access to their own finisher. My favorite moment from the demo happened when I got wrecked by the AI Adam Cole for most of the match, ducked The Boom knee strike, and then almost immediately countered with a One Winged Angel for the pin. It was a perfect encapsulation of what makes wrestling games so uniquely exciting, and Fight Forever nails that feeling.

But not everything was nostalgic bliss. There are some major hit detection issues in the build I played for Fight Forever. I would land the first hit of a strike combo and then completely whiff each follow up strike, leading to me being the one on the receiving end of a flurry of blows. Moments like this are especially frustrating because once you get knocked down in Fight Forever, it’s very hard to get back into the fight. You basically have to land a reversal in order to turn the tide of a match, an issue that was exacerbated by the fact that I was playing against an AI as opposed to a human in my demo. This isn’t a new thing in wrestling games, butmore modern wrestling games have implemented things like quick escapes under the bottom rope, more opportunities to counter certain combo strings and moves beyond just the first strike or grapple, and comeback mechanics that are limited, but give you another chance to get back in fight.

Another bummer is how brief the entrances are. They’re only about 10 seconds long and are limited to just the most iconic bits of each entrance. So you still get Kenny Omega’s throat slit taunt, and Adam Cole’s “Adam Cole Bay-Bay” shout, but that’s about it. In the grand scheme of things, this is the most minor of grievances, but entrances are such a huge part of AEW’s programming, that its hard not to feel a little disappointed by the truncated sequences, even if this too is also true to the N64 era of wrestling games.

Overall, my impression of AEW Fight Forever is that it is exactly what it looks like: A throwback to what many view as the Golden Age of wrestling games. There’s definitely room for a bit more modernization and there are areas that could use a bit of cleaning up, but even with those issues, I still firmly believe that this is exactly the type of wrestling game that fans need right now: an arcadey alternative to the mainstream, much like how AEW itself has established itself as a much need alternative to the mainstream in professional wrestling.