FaceBreaker
Our Rating
6.5
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Your Rating
N/A
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The first offering from EA Freestyle, the latest sub-brand of EA Sports, is a casual arcade style boxing game intended to draw on the frenzied fervor of intense bouts at a more simple level. Facebreaker offers players the ability to choose from a number of varied boxers, each with their own colorful personalties, and square off in intense matches.
The gameplay in Facebreaker is over the top, light on realism and heavy on bone-crushing blows, and gravity defying uppercuts. While intriguing on a base level, the concept tends to fall flat. The fight mechanics are simple: you have a high punch and a low punch for attacking in addition to a dodge, parry, and block to defend against the two types of attack. In theory this should be enough to make up some compelling gameplay, yet the mechanics often feel shallow and redundant.
While the physics maintain a light bouncy feel most of the time, key moves like dodging and parrying feel sluggish, delayed, and inconsistent. There is rarely rhythm to a fight because controls are randomly unresponsive, and the fight system fails to balance offense and defense in a way that makes for an interesting match. You either end up swinging away at your opponent with no thought of defense, or abusing the parry defensively. Or worse, you end up on the receiving end of such a tactic.
Which brings us to another of Facebreaker's shortcomings, the A.I. The A.I in this game is so absurdly inconsistent that in one round, against the same opponent, on the same difficulty level, using the exact same strategy, you can go from receiving the most unholy ass kicking ever witnessed, to reigning down furious obliteration on your opponent, or vice versa. In one match I was taking quite the beating, as I stubbornly kept trying to parrying my opponent's high attack. For no reason discernible to me, at some point I successfully parried his attack, and then did so again, and again, and again, repeatedly. Oddly enough, my A.I opponent never felt the need to switch up his approach and throw a low punch, or even just back off and regroup himself. He just kept throwing the same punch blindly and I kept parrying it every time until I got a knockdown at the end of the round. At the start of the next round I tried to employ the same strategy only to find my opponent had grown a brain, and moreover, that no matter how well I timed it, I couldn't successfully parry a thing.
In another instance, I was able to repeatedly keep punching an opponent with a low attack, and at no point did they attempt to block, parry, dodge, or respond in anyway. They just stood there, and kept getting punched. Alternatively, I had one encounter where I threw a series of eight punches in rapid succession, alternating between high and low attacks at random – every single one of my punches was successfully parried by my opponent. Both of these happenings occurred not only in the same match, against the same opponent, but in the same round.
A mixture of shallow gameplay and bad A.I leads to a repetitive process of guessing which strategy will completely overpower your opponent and repeating it until the game snaps out of its stupidity and completely over powers you with a barrage of god-like moves that you're helpless against.
Somehow, in the midst of all that, the game does occasionally find a sweet spot where you're able to actually have some fun. If you can get through a match where the A.I isn't overly difficult, or incredibly predictable, you can be rewarded with a fast-paced back and forth bout that is pretty decent. Particularly when the matches get really heated, it's a fun button mashing affair that could manage to keep a player interested for an extended period of time were it not for the inescapable shortcomings that eventually pop up again.
Multiplayer plays slightly better than matches against the A.I for obvious reasons, but the limited strategic options allowed for in the gameplay means even against a live opponent your matches are still likely to be decided by one or two moves being used over and over again. Granted, if you really hate your friends, you could get them to play this game with you.
Graphically the game is decidedly cartoonish, and a visually unimpressive game. The real-time facial deformation, for which Facebreaker is named, is present, but hardly worth noting. Faces on character models do noticeably become altered as they take more damage, but at best they look like swollen exaggerations, at times they just look silly, and not in a humorous way.
The soundtrack for Facebreaker comes with the usual playlist of hip-hop and rock tracks meant to get you all amped up, but it feels underwhelming for an EA sports soundtrack. Maybe it's just because of the relevant greatness from the soundtracks on NHL '09 and Madden '09, but the Facebreaker audio cues didn't seem to measure up.
Voice acting is (unfortunately) present in the game, but doesn't serve much purpose other than annoying the player with poorly written taunts and nonsensical phrases from opponents before and after every match. The P.A announcer is the only voice in the game that may get a laugh out of you. This game believes it has a sense of humor when it does not, and continually humiliates itself like that guy who is not even remotely funny but keeps trying to pick up girls at the bar by telling bad jokes.
The only outstanding feature in Facebreaker is the create-a-boxer feature. You can edit existing fighters, start creating your own from scratch, or upload a couple of pictures to the EA servers in order to download them into your game and construct a player based on a picture of a real person. Facebreaker offers the most insanely robust character creation I've ever seen. There are dozens of sliders options that allow you to shape a character down to the slightest detail. Couple that with the ability to upload your own photos to use as a starting point, and this proves to be a character creation system that surpasses any other.
Though Facebreaker had the potential to be something really fun, it simply failed. It's not that Facebreaker had the wrong idea – it had the right idea, an idea that has been successful in the past with series like Punch-Out!! and Ready 2 Rumble. Facebreaker simply didn't execute. The game is often more cumbersome and frustrating than it is fun, and while dedicating some time and effort into playing through the game's shortcomings may yield some fun results, for a game tailored towards the casual audience, that's expecting too much.
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6.0