Facebreaker

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 10th September 2008
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Mental Modal

So, the gameplay is easy to pick up but tough to master and the characters are unique, interesting and quite attractive – ah, Sparrow. How does it all hold up when you actually play though?

Surprisingly well actually and it’s immediately understandable why Electronic Arts has chosen to gone with a flashy and caricaturised look. The gameplay isn’t just fast, it’s fast by beat-em-up standards, and most of the characters can throw standard punches faster than a Mega-man super-combo.

With that in mind, the stylised look of the game is hugely beneficial and the simplified colour palette means that you aren’t just spending half the game watching fireworks and complicated blurs. After some practice you can actually make sense of all this acrobatic violence and provided you’ve got the reaction time of a well-motivated 80’s business man then you might even be able to react in time.

Still, there are weaknesses and they fall neatly into two categories; the places where the game tries to be too clever for its own good and the places where the game tries to be too old-school.

Facebreaker Facebreaker - Problems

We’ll get to the second category soon, but in the first instance the main failing is the custom boxer system which is built into the game. It’s another place where EA is trying to make the most of the face-capturing technology in the Xbox Live Vision game and it’s essentially the same as the system used in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2009.

More than anything though, the problem with it here is that the interface for fiddling with your characters is a little unwieldy and tough to navigate around. The whole process is filled with pauses, loads and back-and-forthing between sliders so that, even when the camera does its job right, the whole affair can be frustrating.

When you’ve got your custom character made though there are still a few issues that shine through and it’s nigh impossible to get a recognisable likeness in the game even if you’ve got a decent starting point. Somehow the custom characters always end up falling into the uncanny valley, unable to clamber out.

Facebreaker Facebreaker - Problems

The different modes on offer also leave a fair bit to be desired as there’s only three choices on offer. There’s the standard multiplayer option where you can take the fight online over Xbox Live or go head to head with a partner sitting next to you, there’s the standard singleplayer mode where you compete against the AI for prizes and then there’s the Couch Royale mode.

The Couch Royale is, as the developers told us when we previewed the game a little while ago, what the game is really all about. It’s here that the real action happens as this mode is built from the ground up as a game for groups to play. In fact, it’s pretty much exactly the type of game you’ll want for those lads or ladies nights in.

You know what we’re talking about – for those times when you’ve got ten or so people splayed out across your apartment and your tossing the controller back and forth as you play ‘Winner Stays On’ and so on. That’s what this mode is all about.

One has got to question if these three modes are really enough though as they are all essentially variations on the same basic theme. With no survivor mode, no semblance of story and no way to upgrade or improve your player over time Facebreaker does feel a little bit like the type of beat-em-up you could burn through and see everything in, if given just a few short hours.

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