Facebreaker by shoutingatco.ws

When was the last time you had a proper jumping-up-and-down tantrum, screaming and bawling like a child in a supermarket being denied a packet of sweets and pissing futilely in your pants at the sheer unfairness of it all?
Chances are, if you can remember your last tantrum, you’re either the wife of a footballer who can’t find the keys to one of the Porsches because some shit has hidden them, or you’ve been playing Facebreaker.

Facebreaker is a cartoon boxing game from EA, with an emphasis on building up pairs of punches to increase a “break” meter, which would let you perform a super-move, if you could only get that far.  Limited to two punches, the imaginatively named “high” and “low”, you hit these in pairs to allow access to a special move, which gets more powerful as you manage more pairs of punches.  Get hit back though, and your special meter drops to zero.  And you will get hit back.  A lot.  Like a ginger haired cliche.

Blocking is like a simplistic “rock, paper, scissors”, only more along the lines of “rock, thing that breaks rock but can also be broken by rock” – you hold X to block high, and if they hit high, you repel them like a videogame journalist with women.  Get hit low, and you’ll end up recoiling in pain.  The obvious problem is that it takes longer to hold X and have the game register it than it does to tap X and punch.  Blocking is HARD, and you have to be incredibly lucky with your timing to make it work.

There’s an element of strategy, in that different characters have different strengths and weaknesses, but in Brawl For It All tournament mode, you have to fight several characters – face someon you’re unfortunate enough to be rubbish against, and they’ll have your face (and control pad) in pieces on the floor before you get the chance to even move.  That’s right; it’s annoyingly easy to be mangled to bits without the opportunity to hit back.  Not fun at all, and the dent marks on my floor will be a long-term reminder of this.

The rules are somewhat skewed, too.  You’re given three rounds to knock your opponent down three times, and then the fourth round becomes a sudden-death affair, where one KO wins.  It’s like the schoolboy football trick of “next goal wins”, where even if you’re 2-0 up, you can be knocked down once in sudden death and lose.  This will typically happen in the more difficult matches, where you definitely want to start again from 0-0.

The only place that Facebreaker does work is multiplayer, where you’re as equally inept as your friends and the fights become a lot less one-sided and there is a degree of satisfaction in hitting someone in the air and uppercutting them into the middle of next week.  Again though, pick two mis-matched fighters and you’ll end up with an all too quick KO.  And a shamefaced trip to Gamestation to buy another control pad.

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