While I find most sport games boring as hell, Fight Night Round 3 drew me in hook (pun intended), line and sinker. So when EA announced they’re working on an arcade styled boxing game – Facebreaker – the newly born boxing fanatic within me stirred afresh. I was looking forward to a 'Fight Night Street' of sorts, but what I ended up with instead was an incredibly shallow experience that killed all the excitement with one swift blow.
The killing blow for me was FaceBreaker’s fighting mechanics. EA Canada went all out to make the game as arcady as possible, and in the bargain they ended up with a product that has no depth at all. Fighting in FaceBreaker involves mashing two buttons – upper punch (square) and lower punch (X) – so hard and often that your fingers will start to bleed. The only trace of depth is in the counter/parry system, which requires you to hold the right shoulder button and either the upper or lower punch buttons simultaneously in order to block/parry/dodge the two types of incoming blows.
Complete a successful, uninterrupted button-mashing spree and you’re rewarded with the chance to execute a ‘facebreaker’, that ends the match in one swift blow, regardless of who’s winning so far or how many rounds are left. How does this work? Well, you get a gauge in the corner of your screen that monitors how well your streak is going. If you miss a punch or get hit, the combo gauge is reset.
Pressing the triangle on the controller uses the power collected in this gauge to execute a variety of ‘breaker’ moves, including SkyBreakers, GroundBreakers, and of course – the match-ending FaceBreaker (provided the gauge is full).
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