FaceBreaker

Each match of FaceBreaker consists of three rounds, during which you have to either knock your opponent down thrice, or break their face. This means that some matches take 10-15 minutes to finish, while others end in just 10-15 seconds, provided you gain the upper hand and execute a FaceBreaker. If you play against the AI, the first two arenas are pretty challenging, but after that the difficulty scales to unrealistic heights, making the game unrealistically frustrating.

Even when you do manage to emerge victorious from those close-to-impossible bouts, all you’re really rewarded with is an intense pain in your wrists and fingers, and maybe a completely useless trophy of your opponent’s head. To increase your frustration level to new heights, every time you finish a bout, your AI opponent either gloats or congratulates you, using some of the most lame and annoying lines heard in recent times. To put it simply: this game was built ground-up for button-mashers and button-mashers only; if you like your fighting games with any sort of learning curve or depth, look elsewhere.

Even in player-vs-player bouts, the one who gets accustomed to timing the counters sooner usually ends up victorious. This sort of over-dependence on blocking, parrying and dodging blows, along with the complete absence of any sort of combos, severely paralyzes the game’s chance of appealing to even hardcore fighting gamers. If you like games like Tekken or Dead or Alive, the sad lack of essential ingredients in this game will put you off in no time.

Even the character creation option, which was supposed to be a big part of the game, is a gimmick. You gain barely any real-time control over how your character’s face looks; instead, you have to upload a side and front picture of yourself, or the character you want to create, and the game produces a half-assed render that you can stick on the handful of body frames available. Then you pick from an uninspired and incredibly limited selection of gloves and outfits to match your half-assed character, and voila, you have a character that even you wouldn’t give a crap about five minutes after you’ve created it.

There’s no other way to put it... FaceBreaker is crap. All it manages to do is take the fighting genre back into prehistoric times, since it doesn’t even implement any of the essential elements a game in this genre requires. Nothing – not even the pretty visuals – will make me spend a single rupee on the game. If you’re planning on buying it, I'd suggest that you reconsider.