Right now gentlemen, I want a good clean fight…
Well I want to apologise to everyone (especially EA) for taking so long to get this review done. When I was sent the game, my Xbox was suffering from the red ring of death, so Microsoft took a few weeks to repair in and since then I’ve had a lot of other commitments. When I finally got around to playing Facebreaker, I discovered that aside from the obvious fact that it is a cartoony button masher, it’s a not particularly good cartoony button masher.
The game doesn’t really have a story from what I gathered, but I find stories in fighting games pretty pointless anyway, so that wasn’t a problem. As with countless other fighting games, you can choose either an ‘arcade’ mode, which in this case is simply called ‘Fight’, where you chose a character, and use him/her to beat the crap out of another CPU controlled character. The other mode to speak of is the ‘Brawl for it all’ mode, where the player fights a set list of characters in mini-tournaments, culminating in a boss style fight. As expected, these fights become progressively harder the further into the game you get. What I didn’t really expect was for them to be extremely hard from the off. Don’t even try starting on what would normally be the medium setting, try starting on the easiest and hope for the best.
The game also has a multiplayer online mode, which I didn’t try so I won’t comment on.
The main problem I have with this game is the incredibly frustrating balancing issues. Some of the characters are given incredibly easy moves which stun the opponent for around 3 seconds, allowing you to cause as much damage as humanly possible, and in some cases completely finish the fight. Punch combos are built up and indicated in a 4 colour meter. Depending on how large your combo is, and how high this meter is, you can get progressively more powerful combo breaker moves. The most powerful of these is ‘facebreaker’, which, if attained, actually ends the fights in a single move. With the aforementioned ‘cheap’ stun moves given to some characters, and with some good timing, these moves are surprisingly easy to get.
With a good sense of timing, you could complete this game with 2 buttons
Another problem I had with this game is that the CPU controlled characters, especially in the later tournaments, seem way too good, and have lightning fast reflexes. For example, in one of the later tournaments, it is common for you to doge or parry an opponent’s move, only for them to automatically dodge or parry your next, and continue beating you to a pulp. I hate to imagine what the game would be like on the hardest difficulty setting.
Facebreaker’s graphics seemed decidedly reminiscent of Ready 2 Rumble on older platforms, and gave an impression that this game is made more for children and teens than other games like ‘fight night’. One of the main selling points of the game is that is has ‘real time facial disfiguration’, meaning that every punch landed on the opponent’s face leaves it more and more deformed. It may be my slightly twisted sense of humour but I found this quite entertaining.
The soundtrack is nothing to speak of really, although I did hear a remix of Wolfmother’s ‘woman’ in there, which redeems the game slightly. I hadn’t really heard any of the other songs, and the in-game sounds are just what you would expect from this type of game. Unfortunately I didn’t hear much variation in the punch sounds, but it wasn’t bad enough to be offputting.
Overall, facebreaker is an average button-basher with some serious balancing issues. With a good sense of timing, you could complete this game with 2 buttons, and even just playing through normally it won’t take you that long. The game may be better suited to children and early teens, and the humour in the game also seems aimed at this demographic. Unless you are really desperate to play a new fighting game, I would stick with something tried and tested like dead or alive, tekken or if you want a more serious boxing game, fight night round 3.
The Bad: Balancing issues, typical button basher with no tactics involved.
