Earlier today THQ Nordic released the first official trailer for AEW: Fight Forever, the upcoming wrestling game featuring the stars of All Elite Wrestling. If the trailer looks familiar, it’s probably because the whole thing leaked last week, and popped up all over the wrestling internet. That leak was of fairly low video quality, so this is our first time really seeing the game in action in HD, and guess what: it looks like it could be fun.
AEW has made a big deal about working with Yuke’s on AEW: Fight Forever. Yuke’s worked on official WWF / WWE wrestling games from 2000 all the way up to 2018, with an earlier history of making New Japan wrestling games back to 1995. Perhaps the only people with more experience making wrestling games are the developers from Human who created the Fire Pro series in the ‘80s and then moved on to Spike in 2000. Of course Yuke’s last several installments of the WWE 2K series were fairly lacking, so it’s hard to know what to expect from Fight Forever at this time. Former AEW World champ and resident gaming expert Kenny Omega has long promised a game indebted to the beloved AKI/THQ wrestling games made for the Nintendo 64 (think WCW/NWO Revenge, WWF WrestleMania 2000 and WWF No Mercy), even bringing No Mercy director Hideyuki Iwashita on as a producer of Fight Forever. With Yuke’s long history of making wrestling games, and direct inspiration from the greatest series of wrestling games ever made, Fight Forever could be something really special.
The trailer only gives us a few brief glimpses of in-game action (hopefully that slo-mo replay of Britt Baker’s curb stomp is a feature that can be turned off), but it reveals that it’ll feature a variety of weapons options, as well as a suite of Mario Party-style minigames. THQ Nordic has also promised a career mode and a number of customization options, along with a plentiful roster of AEW’s top stars. Separately released screenshots also revealed an AKI-style spirit meter for each character, the clearest sign yet that Fight Forever is trying to recapture that classic N64 feel. We’re still waiting on a release date, but it will be available on pretty much all current systems, including the PlayStation 4 and 5, the Xbox One and Series X|S, PC, and even Switch. Given how popular fan-made AEW creations are on WWE 2K22’s download shop, it’s clear there’s a lot of people interested in playing as AEW wrestlers. If Fight Forever lives up to its inspiration, it could be exactly what the long-stagnant wrestling videogame world needs.
Check out the trailer below, featuring some comedy from former AEW World Women’s champ Dr. Britt Baker DMD and legendary WCW/AEW announcer Tony Schiavone.