Face Broken

There’s a lot of little nuances in Facebreaker which really help it stand out in the crowd and give it some personality too. The soundtrack for example is perfectly chosen and great fun to listen to, with some fantastic choices of tunes for introducing the characters setting up the victories.

However, there are some serious gripes we have with the game which really hold back the pick-up-and-play appeal of the title.

The first is something we hinted at before; that the game is trying too hard to be an old-school beat-em-up at points and missing out on the fact that games have changed for a reason.

The best example of this is the singleplayer game, which even on the easiest difficulty is still monumentally difficult. In fact, this actually put forth quite a little dilemma for us in that while the game is definitely very taxing for players it does at least tell you in advance that you should expect to die a lot until you figure out the weakness of your opponent.

Can you really criticise a game for being too difficult if it warns you about it in advance? Well, yes, you can if you’re playing on the easiest difficulty with a variety of characters and you still fail to get to the second opponent in (literally) nine fights out of ten – especially since the opponents have no identifiable weak points.


Seriously, we’re not exaggerating. The fights are really, really hard. As in even though we’d already played the game against the developers and we knew the characters inside and out, we still had an awful lot of trouble going up against even the first combatant on the easiest difficulty. It’s horribly, horribly unfair and it's simply off putting.

There are a lot of extra bits and bobs which help round out Facebreaker and make it a good choice for ultra-competitive types – like the bragging rights section or the ability to upload your boxers and highlights to an EA Games website. It has to be said though that there’s only limited incentive to do that.

There are other issues too, like the default that every round goes on for three minutes and that there be three rounds in each match, with the first to three knock-outs winning. This means that the default setup used in the singleplayer game is massively fatiguing and more of a chore than a game.

This is what we mean when we say that the game is trying to be too old-school, as it seems to ignore the fact that games aren’t like this anymore because most players don’t like repeatedly having their asses handed to them. We prefer a fair, balanced game with challenging but not invincible opponents. Facebreaker unfortunately edges closer to the opposite end of the scale.


In the end, as with all beat-em-ups, audiences are going to polarised into three camps. There’s those who don’t like beat-em-ups full stop and see them as pointless button mash-fests. There’s those of us who like them, but tend to get bored fairly quickly with no story or compelling unlockables to keep us playing. Finally, there’s those who love all beat-em-ups for the complex strategies they can weave with the gameplay, the skill of learning all the timings and moves, and through this the way they can dominate their enemies.

Honestly though, all three parties are catered too with Facebreaker. Ostensibly, it is just a button mash-fest and can all the unlockable stuff can be had within a good few hours of play. As we mentioned before too, there’s a surprising amount of depth to the combat if you want to study it and the average battle goes on long enough for that strategy to be important.

In the end though, though Facebreaker definitely suffers from some flaws with the AI. The game isn’t especially long in the tooth either and is very much intended for group matches on a late Saturday night – an appeal which is ruined by the long matches and fatiguing gameplay.

There’s a solid brawler here which is well suited to hardcore beat-em-up fans, but if you’re heart lies with other genres or you want to see some serious value for money then you may want to look elsewhere because while Facebreaker may seem casual, it’s anything but. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, but forewarned is always forearmed.

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