Reviews
Before you are to purchase EA's newest you need to ask yourself what kind of a game you wish to add to your collection. If you are after a successor to the boxing gem Fight Night 3, Facebreaker is not your title. If you are after a casual easy to enjoy title, again Facebreaker is not it. Facebreaker, whilst wearing the appearance of a boxing game, is in fact a fighter that is actually quite a difficult game with a steep learning curve. To be fair the game itself has some great ideas, such as face deformation and the ability to scan yourself into the game. However the area where Facebreaker struggles to impress is in its gameplay, with unfair and often frustrating mechanics that often let the game down. Facebreaker is tough and is not for the faint of heart.
First impressions of Facebreaker show potential with a very streamlined control system. A is used to attack, X is used for a strong attack, Y is used for a Breaker move and B is used to throw your opponent. By entering the games Fight mode which is your standard quick start type menu, you are presented with 3 difficulty modes and practice mode. Practice mode is great as you can choose to have your opponent not fight at all, allowing you to purely practice combos and other special moves. Once you feel more confident, using the D-pad you can change the the opponent to fight defensively, offensively or fight standard once you feel ready for it. This is a well thought out feature and definitely a benefit to the game. The other difficulties are great for building up your skills for Facebreaker's campaign mode known as Brawl For It All. Brawl for it all can be quite misleading with its difficulty levels known as Fierce, Truculent and Impossible. You may be quite good when playing easy in Fight mode but lets get one thing straight, Easy in the Fight mode is not the same difficulty as Fierce, the basic difficulty in Brawl for it all mode.
The first level or belt of Brawl For It All mode, is called The Arcade. Now this level can be passed with ease. However the game becomes significantly more difficult on the next belt called The Crue. The Crue holds one of the most frustrating boss fights in the game when you come up against Voodoo. Voodoo as with all AI will fight with some very quick flurry attacks that are often unblockable, following up with one of the many special breakers on your character. Breakers, such as the ground or sky breaker, are again almost impossible to block, especially when fighting Voodoo as he will continually use his stun move on your character. This quickly becomes annoying and eventually boring as sometimes the whole match will consist of Voodoo stunning you and unleashing some nasty combos, before repeating again until you loose. Even when Voodoo is not continuously using his stun move, your character simply cannot match the speed the AI is fighting at. These instances of quick successive attacks become even more evident when the AI has been knocked down two times. Whilst it is natural to assume a fighter would give their all to avoid a loss when close to the point of loosing, it is not fair for the AI to have the opponents come back from the dead to win via an unbalanced, unfair system.
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