Facebreaker is EA's answer to casual gaming. With this game, they reinvented the Fight Night series to appeal to a more casual audience. My only issue with that is in doing so, this game neither qualifies as a casual game nor as a hardcore fighter.

The game is a no-brainer with two easy buttons to mash for high and low punches, but it's unbalanced and extremely painful at times. A good fighting game involves depth, strategy, and a combination-based fighting mechanic. FB has a glimpse of all that, but none are explored to their full potential.

The game's a first for the new sub-brand under the EA banner called Freestyle; EA plans to churn out casual games for a much larger audience under that banner. To be honest, this isn't the best offering by EA and not a very good start for Freestyle.

All flair and frustrating

FaceBreaker has all the polish you'd expect from an EA game: it's presented with flair and cell-shaded graphics that suit the nature of gameplay. EA has set a new benchmark for casual games, by not adding cute gestures with pink floral designs. Every action in the game has an extra thump to it, be it the exaggerated heavy sounds while scrolling through the menu or the ringside bell during transitions.

There aren't many modes to explore in FaceBreaker, you can get right into the action or take part in a chain of events in "Brawl For It All". In this mode you pay through a number of matches against all the other fighters and win belts. There are about four belts or titles to be won, and winning them is not easy. The game gets insanely difficult later on, so much so that even Fight Night veterans find it hard to cope up with the AI. You win a game by either knocking the opponent down three times or by breaking his face. A facebreaker move is a finishing move that can knock out an opponent within the first six seconds of the game, if you execute it right. The player sees a breaker-meter on his screen, which is made up of about 4 blocks. Each block in the breaker-meter fills up after you land about 2-3 consecutive punches on the enemy, depending on the number of blocks filled, you can hit the enemy with various break moves called groundbreaker, skybreaker or facebreaker. As mentioned before the facebreaker move is the ultimate finisher move and turns your enemy into pulp.

To reach the Facebreaker finisher, you have to land quite a few punches on the opponent and at the same time, avoid getting hit. Attacking is very simple, one button is for high punch the other, for a low punch. You keep mashing these till you get enough juice on the breaker meter and then you hit triangle to land a haymaker. It's fairly simple and repetitive; although the different haymakers are presented very well, they get old too soon. Defending is again split into dodging and parry, which is easy to learn but really hard to master. You see -- both the attacking and defending depends upon your speed to mash the assigned buttons and that's about it, so if you are good at mashing those buttons, you will be a pro in FB. Pressing the R1 button and the action buttons helps you parry if you time it right, but to dodge you need to press and hold the action buttons, so it can be a little difficult.

The game is very fast-paced, which looks and feels great initially, but at higher difficulties the AI is just too much for you. It's like playing the Dragonforce song -- Through Fire and Flame in Guitar Hero III at Expert: it's not impossible but really, really difficult. Check out the following video and you will know, why I gave the guitar hero reference. After defeating an enemy you get a Trophy Head with your opponent's head on it.