Facebreaker Hands-on Preview

First Thoughts

Still though, we’ve barely scratched the surface of Facebreaker, a sentence which definitely belies the fact that we think there’s more replayability and depth in Facebreaker than you’ll likely find in most beat-em-ups.

Again, considering that the game doesn’t even plunge into the cheap-and-cheerful game lengthening routes of recent Mortal Kombat games where Tetris and Mario Kart clones are considered major features, that’s definitely saying something.

In fact, when you again go and consider that…ah, nevermind. The point is, we’re saying something. Something about muffins, probably.

Instead of using artificial and tacked-on minigames to help draw out the experience, EA Canada has designed Facebreaker to be a more customisable game so that you can get the experience you want out of it. That probably does sound like so much marketing hype, but believe it or not it’s still true.

Almost everything in Facebreaker can be tweaked, trimmed, re-tooled or…something else beginning with T. You’re never just limited to changing the round length – you can change movement speeds, damage, range, the whole works. Or, if you’re feeling lazy then there’s a whole load of presets to turn through.


This customisability is especially surprising for the Wii version too. It would have been easy for Facebreaker: KO Party to be a simple Wii Sports clone with a dash of minigames and a bunch of graphics that look crappier than the inside of my toilet after another bit-tech BBQ. That would have been a walk in the park for EA – but instead the company chose to do it the hard way.

Thus, the Wii version of Facebreaker is very similar to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation version of the game, though with some different arenas and an extra, exclusive character. The extra minigames which have been added in are simpler, shorter and more in key with the game as a whole – cat and mouse games within the boxing ring, for example.

That said, our experience with Facebreaker did leave us with a few concerns. Not really any big ones, but some concerns nonetheless.

The first thing that struck us as odd was in the fairly limited number of characters and arenas – with under a dozen playable characters on show, it doesn’t matter how cool they are to look at, the gameplay is still essentially limited. That’s not to say that every game has to go to the same extent as Mortal Kombat and start bundling roughly half a billion dull identi-fighters, but a little more freedom of choice might be welcome.

There’s also the fairly limiting arenas and game environments to bear in mind too. Nowadays, most beat-em-ups on next gen consoles have something cool for players to explore or experiment with – destructible environments or cool weapons to swap over or play with. At the very least Tekken has an over-elaborate story with loads of video cutscenes.


Facebreaker though has none of this. Unlockable costumes are there, but since when did anyone really care about what pattern their overweight Russian dreeadnought was wearing on his shorts?

Of course, there is an argument here that it’s actually the newer games that are in the wrong and that we don’t really need all this fancy-pants mumbo-jumbo. These arguments are usually made by the type of people who can recognise that games like Dead or Alive and Soul Calibur are really just using enlarged cup sizes and multi-tiered environments to hide one thing; that the baseline mechanics haven’t really evolved in years.

If you’re of that persuasion then it seems like Facebreaker is the type of game that’s going to appeal to you. It trims out all this fat and, though there are a few zoomed-in and cheeky close-ups of some semi-exposed breasts to help keep the pre-pubes happy, the focus for Facebreaker is very much on the old-school and streamlined fighter premise of old.

If that sort of thing is your cup of tea or other beverage of choice, then Facebreaker may well be worth breaking into your wallet for.

Facebreaker is out on the 5th of September on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, or on the Wii on the 11th of November. If you've got any questions or comments then pass them on in the forums.