AEW: Fight Forever - Elite Beats and Stadium Stampede Expansion

I'll be straight with you: I came at this one as someone who doesn't usually care about wrestling games, but Stadium Stampede got my attention because a 30-player battle royale built on arcade wrestling mechanics is genuinely a weird concept worth examining. The Elite Beats and Stadium Stampede Expansion is a free DLC pack for AEW: Fight Forever, dropping five new music tracks and 20 skins into a base game that, depending on who you ask, is either a charming throwback or an overpriced N64 nostalgia trip dressed in modern clothing. Let's talk about the Stadium Stampede mode itself, because the skins and tracks are non-events. Stadium Stampede puts up to 30 players into a full football stadium - field, stands, vendor areas, offices, tunnels, parking garage - and runs a shrinking-circle battle royale until one person is left standing. Opponents get eliminated by depleting their health bar and then landing a finisher on them when they're dazed. Weapons litter the map in loot crates: trash cans, golf clubs, barbed wire baseball bats, t-shirt cannons. On paper, that sounds like a blast. In practice, the moment you're dealing with more than one opponent at a time, targeting goes to pieces. The invulnerability frames during energy drink animations are genuinely baffling - you'll watch three wrestlers flail around each other landing nothing because the game can't decide who should take damage. It's janky in a way that feels less like intentional chaos and more like an engine not built for this scale. Population is the real issue. Reports from players across platforms point to lobby wait times that can stretch uncomfortably long, and when a full lobby doesn't fill, AI bots pad out the roster. The base game itself sits on mixed reviews on Steam, hovering around 59 percent positive, with the recurring criticism being thin content relative to its launch price. The core arcade mechanics - punch, kick, grapple, build momentum, hit a finisher - are solid and clearly draw from the WWF No Mercy school, which is fine. But the Road to Elite career mode is short, the creation suite is barebones, and the match variety only stretches so far before you've seen it all. This expansion doesn't address any of that. What you're actually getting here is a cosmetic refresh. The 20 skins give you more outfit variety across the roster, and the five music tracks add some audio flavour if you care about entrance themes. If you're a current Fight Forever player who wants a reason to boot it back up, Stadium Stampede has a ceiling of genuinely stupid fun - the setting, the weapons, the finisher animations all land correctly for the tone AEW goes for. But the mode has been in the game since mid-2023, and the low server population problem hasn't resolved itself. You may spend more time waiting in lobbies than actually playing. For shooter-brained players who usually want tight netcode and a ranked ladder that matters, this mode scratches none of those itches. It's chaotic, unranked, and framerate-dependent rather than skill-dependent. Grab it because it's free and you already own the base game. Don't let it be the reason you buy Fight Forever if you haven't already - the expansion adds nothing that changes the underlying value equation. Fred, Scout Team