The ever popular stream of EA Sports titles continues to bang out new titles, and Facebreaker could be considered a nice break from the stream of officially licensed titles based on the NHL, NFL, FIFA and so on.

However the appeal of Facebreaker is short lived, as you soon realise that behind the fun looking cartoon style and visually appealing character designs lies a game of incredible frustration, with a blatant lack of effort paid to the gameplay - and to be honest, a complete lack of effort in most other areas of the game, too.

Facebreaker is a game for button mashers only, and even the few button mashers that remain on the console gaming scene nowadays will find themselves incredibly bored and fed up with Facebreaker in a very short period of time.

As I already said, the game looks good from the outset, with a nice appealing package, backed up by good graphical ability within the game and impressive frame rates to back it up. The characters themselves are without doubt the best part of Facebreaker, as they look good, they are very well animated despite coming in all shapes and sizes, and the possibilities made available to you in terms of character customisation are quite literally endless thanks to the built in photo upload feature, which will allow you to slap your face on to your fighter - or anybody else’s face for that matter.

The facial rendering process when a photo is uploaded can take a while, but when it is done the results are quite astonishing in many cases as although this feature is not new altogether, Facebreaker does it better than most other titles that you may have seen it in before. You will not fail to be impressed with it, it’s just a shame the same can not be said about the rest of the game.

Creating a completely customised character will take time, and you may find yourself struggling for creativity or you may just be bored. If this is the case, there is nothing to worry about, as you can head online and download characters that have been created by other Facebreaker players - some of which bare a remarkable resemblance to celebrities such as George Bush and Jackie Chan amongst others. You will find some more comical characters there too, such as a beefed-up Borat. Downloading characters into your game may be your best way of adding a little fun to Facebreaker, as creating your own will probably be a waste of time as you will not want to play the game for very long anyway.

The limitless character creation possibilities are in stark contrast to your choice of game modes, with only a few available to you, and none of them are much fun to be blunt. The quick fight mode could be considered fun if you have a minute or two to spare and nothing more, as the fight will consist of three short rounds only, followed by a sudden death round if no winner has yet been decided. Brawl For It All is a tournament mode where you begin at the bottom of a ladder and fight your way to the top with the ultimate aim of holding all five belts in the game, which can sound like a challenge, but that’s not a good way to look at it as the AI behind your opponents is bizarre to say the least.

At times your opponents will virtually rollover and let you beat the crap out of them as you see fit, keeping fights short and progress fast. However, if for some strange reason your opponent decides the time has come for you to lose - you will lose. No matter how much you were dominating them prior to this decision, they will suddenly turn super-human and nothing you can do seems to prevent them from taking you down at their will. This, combined with the dodgy control system itself, makes for an unbelievably frustrating game experience which will leave you wanting to punch your walls or TV screen rather than your in-game opponents.

Facebreaker is dreadful, there are no two ways about it, and the good graphics and smooth animation and frame rates in the face of the game’s fast fighting ‘action’ do nothing to build any kind of fun factor for gamers of any age. I fail to see why EA have bothered to release Facebreaker, they should be ashamed of themselves. Steer clear of this one!

• Social Bookmarking
  
  • Subscribe
  • Blinklist
  • Bloglines
  • Blogmarks
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati