Just about every sport (that’s popular outside the Commonwealth) under the sun has two video game incarnations; the simulation, and the arcade style game. Boxing has been dominated by the latter type of game, no doubt owing to the theatrics the sport has developed in the last couple of decades. Super Punch Out!! and Ready 2 Rumble are the undisputed kings of the arcade boxing game, remembered for their casts of unique characters and their fast, addictive gameplay. In recent times, EA has jumped on the arcade sports bandwagon with its NBA, FIFA and NFL Street games – now they’re throwing their hat in the ring with Facebreaker.

Facebreaker follows the arcade boxing formula to a T, with the usual selection of crazy stereotypes, over-the-top fighting moves and ridiculously overstated facial damage. The main hook of Facebreaker is a detailed boxer creation system, whereby players upload their pictures either to their EA Sportsworld gamer profile, or directly into the game via the Xbox Vision Camera or PlayStation Eye, and the game creates a boxer with their exact facial features. While it’s not the first time EA have implemented this technology, Facebreaker produces far better digital representations than any other game using the tech. It’s kind of cool seeing what a brutal beating would do to your face without having to cough up for expensive plastic surgery after the fact.


Creating a boxer using the EA Gamerface tech takes about 10 minutes. To prevent people uploading inappropriate photos of non-facial body parts, the game requires that you line up predetermined points on your face to match a sample picture. Sometimes the game will complain (and refuse to generate) if you’re a few millimetres out, but generally it works pretty well. When the boxer’s face is complete, you’ll be asked to select a body from one of the 12 original boxers – unfortunately, there are no options to create your own style. From there, you’ll get to mess around with the usual selection of hair styles and apparel to make your boxer the way you see fit. Once your boxer is complete, you can upload him/her to EA Sportsworld, and share him with your friends. The game encourages making a wide variety of boxers, and even comes with a few D-List celebrities to beat up on, like Kim Kardashian, Snoop Dogg and everybody’s favourite video game exec, Peter Moore. A few players online have taken it upon themselves to create all sorts of celebrities and movie characters including Borat, The Joker and Rocky Balboa.

Sadly, beating Peter Moore into a bloody pulp as revenge for the early death of the Dreamcast is about as fun as Facebreaker gets. The game is insanely light on features; in a way, it seems like it’s a tech demo for the Gamerface technology with an extremely simplistic boxing game attached. Play options are severely limited, with only exhibition fights, a tournament system (Couch Potato) and the single player focused Brawl for it All mode, which is merely a structured series of fights. Victory in the single player game will unlock more fighters and arenas, but little else. Online multiplayer is available, but the play options are negligible. Net code is actually pretty solid, with most lag only ever occurring at the pre-fight introduction. The game has a small selection of achievements, with most of the points focused on beating the single player side of things, in some cases without being defeated, or so much as being knocked down. Given the sheer difficulty of the single player side of things, you’re more likely to become the next Prime Minister than unlock any of those achievements.


Facebreaker’s brand of pugilism is lighting fast, but with all the depth of an inflatable kiddies’ pool. Each bout runs for just three rounds; to win, you must either knock your opponent down three times, or execute a Facebreaker move. If there is no victor at the end of three rounds, the fight goes into sudden death, where the next knock down wins the bout. Control over your fighter is limited and noticeably unresponsive. Basic attacks consist of a high punch and a low punch, which can (and should) be alternated. The more damaging haymaker punch is also accessible, but requires correct timing and distance for a decent chance of hitting. Defense is straightforward, with one all purpose block button, backed up by some stick-flicking dashing and parries. Realistically, Facebreaker plays a heck of a lot more like a fighting game than a boxing game, favouring an all-out offense as opposed to anything remotely resembling boxing strategy.

There is no real strategy involved in Facebreaker’s fights. The basic aim is just to knock the other guy out, and that can be accomplished by randomly mashing buttons and hoping for the best. If your punches connect, the Facebreaker meter will begin to fill – when it reaches the maximum level, hitting the opponent with a haymaker will put them on the mat, and hitting any other button thereafter will result in the Facebreaker attack. The Facebreaker is not unlike the Gamebreaker of the NBA, FIFA and NFL Street games, but rather than giving the player a shot at a comeback or unassailable lead, the Facebreaker causes massive facial damage and immediately ends the match.

Twelve characters make up Facebreaker’s default roster – you’ve got the usual mix of exaggerated cultural, racial and gender stereotypes, with a monkey thrown in for good measure, in some way making the game seem like a tragic rip-off of Midway’s Ready 2 Rumble. Despite the manual’s claim to the contrary, there is very little to differentiate each fighter. Each has their own style, one or two unique moves and body shape, but that matters very little in the grand scheme of things as you can get by purely on mashing buttons. The fastest button masher wins - at least when playing against humans, that is.


Facebreaker has AI that is so cheap that it’d make a Midway arcade machine blush. No matter which difficulty you chose, the CPU will destroy you. In fact, the only thing the difficulty levels stipulate is how long the CPU will decide to take in destroying you. The game even takes pride in its cheap AI, telling you that you’re going to lose, and lose often. You can use a combination of every tool at your disposal – dodging, parrying, countering, and you’d have the same level of success as you would if you attempted to play with your feet. I’m not one to shy away from a fair challenge, but Facebreaker’s level of difficulty is ludicrous.

It’s impossible to find any justification for playing Facebreaker. The Gameface feature is a nice idea, but it has (and will continue to be) put to use in better games. Facebreaker seems like a glorified demo for the face mapping technology, but on top of that, it’s also an overly simplistic, infuriating mess of a game. I’m dumbfounded as to how Facebreaker managed to gain approval at EA, especially with the publisher’s renewed focus on producing high quality titles. As a low cost downloadable title, one might have had some quick, throwaway fun with Facebreaker, but charging full retail price for a game with so little in the way of content is just absurd.