Breaking Faces with FaceBreaker

I had a chance to play around with Facebreaker a bit on the Penny Arcade Expo show floor over the weekend.

Graphically, the game delivers, but I was a little surprised, slightly disappointed even, at how simplistic the controls were.The four face buttons let you throw high punches, low punches, strong punches and perform a grab and throw. To block a punch you pull a trigger and to duck a punch you hold in the corresponding punch button.

While you can move your fighter around with the joystick, this doesn’t really seem to come into play much. Mostly you want to be close enough to duke it out and I found myself relying on the duck buttons to avoid blows, rather than moving my fighter away from the fight.

What stripping down the controls so significantly does it create a button-mashing brawling that can be fun to play at times, but that may not deliver a game that with a lot of staying power.

I had fun bashing in the face of Tristan’s pugilist, and occasionally having mine bashed in, but I can’t imagine it would be a game I’d want to play for any length of time. And while the simple controls seem like a perfect fit for young gamers, the over-the-top cartoon violence and T-rating seems like it will filter out most of the people who will most want to keep playing the game.