Facebreaker K.O Party

Facebreaker is already available for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. It is, by all accounts, crap. The Wii is being graced with a more multiplayer orientated affair, but does the fact that you can wave your hands around like a loon make this game any good?

As you may expect from a boxing game, the wii remote and nunchuck are put to great use – each representing a fist. You swing your arms, you punch your opponent. Easy enough. The controls are actually quite disappointing. You’d think with motion sensitive controllers that you’d be able to pull off a few nifty moves depending how you moved your hands. That’s not the case. You move your hand, your character makes a move. You can charge your punches by tilting the remotes backwards, but this move opens you up to a whole world of hurt from your opponent. Land enough punches and you have access to more powerful moves pulled off by pressing the A button as you swing. In the end, you just look like a zombie with a nasty case of the arm spasms. But hey, this is the Wii after all – looking like an idiot while you play is part of the fun.

Looking like an idiot in front of your friends or family is an even bigger part of the fun, so this version of Facebreaker is definately geared towards the multiplayer experience. The single player mode, in which you fight for various different belts, is quite a boring ordeal and just seems to be a way to unlock the rest of the twelve playable characters in the game. Each character has different Haymaker moves but you really stop to care after a while, and yes the intro movies are entertaining for the first couple of times after which you’ll be pressing every button you can find to skip the damn things. And expect to get very frustrated as the AI constantly almost parries you when you’ve got a decent move powered up.

Everything else available to you on the game menu is geared for you and some friends. There’s the arcade challenge and a knock-out tournament but what you’d probably spend most of your time playing is the “Punch-O-Matic” mode where a giant punch-activated slot machine chooses what fun mini-game you will be playing next.

OK, I lied – they’re not that much fun. They’re all, basically, a boxing match with a certain condition to them – you can only do damage with power moves, for example. On the initial few play throughs, you can have quite a good laugh but there are so many elements of the multiplayer game that fly in the face of the fun – from the painfully slow “punch-o-matic” machine and the limited choice of games (I played the same mini-games too many times while testing!) to the annoying (and now unskippable) intro videos.

The cartoon-style graphics are quite effective and you can, and will, disfigure your opponents face during the bouts but it’s nothing special. If anything, the graphics almost make it look like it’s suited to the Wii, they look like they could be fun and, by extension, the game will be too. The old saying “don’t judge a book by it’s cover” couldn’t be more true. It’s not as fun and wacky as it makes out.

The commentary is awful, with sarcastic comments being dealt at many occasions during the game. While in multiplayer, you’ll often hear “The Punch-O-Matic is not impressed.”

To be honest, neither am I.