If you like wrestling games, then the name Yuke’s will be instantly familiar. This Japanese development team has been involved with some of the best grapplers ever made, including New Japan Pro Wrestling: Toukon Retsuden, WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw and, more recently, the official WWE games up until publisher 2K shifted development to subsidiary Visual Concepts (with alarming results, it should be noted).
Following the termination of its agreement with 2K, Yuke’s has been hard at work on a new wrestling IP with a different organisation, which has now been revealed as All Elite Wrestling. Founded in 2019, AEW is something of a rookie on the professional wrestling circuit, but it has already secured legendary talent such as Kenny Omega, Chris Jericho and Cody Rhodes, son of the famous Dusty Rhodes.
At a special event to announce the establishment of AEW’s video game division, Omega – Executive Vice President of the wrestling outfit – revealed early footage of the game dressed in a Steve Jobs-style outfit. Omega explains that he wanted to be part of the company’s video game division from day one, and that he hopes the forthcoming game will follow in the footsteps of the likes of “fun” titles like NBA Jam, No Mercy and Virtual Pro Wrestling.
The game is coming to “current and next-gen consoles”, which means the Switch is in with a shot; the visuals shown certainly look like they could be reproduced quite faithfully on Nintendo’s machine, at least.
The last of the mainline WWE games to come to Switch was WWE 2K18, but we’ve also had the light-hearted WWE 2K Battlegrounds since then.
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