There's no question that the sweet science has been awfully kind to EA. After four years of reigning as the king of boxing titles with the Fight Night series, the publisher has turned its eye to the dormant genre of arcade-style boxing. FaceBreaker, its new attempt to fill the spot left vacant by Ready 2 Rumble, tries to take cartoonish fisticuffs to the HD era. Unfortunately, its rock-paper-scissors gameplay doesn't feel nearly as balanced as that of its past counterparts, making it an awfully hard sell.

FaceBreaker's pretty simple to explain. You pick from a garden variety of outrageous characters, from the chubby martial artist Steve to silver-haired cover star Ice, and button-mash your way to a championship belt. Alternately, you can create a boxer or download user-created faces to graft onto your pugilist. Then you unleash a twitchy torrent of punches in the hopes that your opponent won't get up.

At its core, the boxing system is designed so that each attack negates another. Light attacks beat strong attacks, but can't overcome defense. Defense can block a light attack, but as the old saying goes, "the best defense is a good offense," so strong punches will snap through a block. You can hold down your high and low jab buttons to dodge an oncoming attack, or use a block modifier to parry punches. Although it would seem as though the block/parry system is borrowed from Fight Night, it's not nearly as responsive or well-structured. Each fighter has strengths and weaknesses that can be exploited (most of them seem to be exploitable strengths). If you're able to build up enough punches (odds are, this will only happen with unwitting victims or in practice mode), you can unleash super attacks that end the entire bout with a decisive blow.


The real problem with FaceBreaker is that its gameplay isn't particularly satisfying. If you're a hardcore boxing fan, it's too shallow to replace Fight Night. If you play fighting games, its core mechanics are too broken and unbalanced to give it much depth beyond the demo on Xbox Live and PSN. If you only dabble in either of the aforementioned genres, it's a bit too chaotic for anything beyond a few rounds on the couch in multiplayer. Single-player is a nightmare, regardless of difficulty level. Even after extensive practice in tutorial mode, the AI is too brutal to make a round feel like anything but a chore. The balancing system sounds great on paper, but in execution it's far too sloppy to be much more than a button-masher that would've been better-served with some slightly slower gameplay.

The online experience is really only as good as the gameplay. Most rounds are exceptionally brief, and the fighting system isn't fluid enough to make it worth venturing onto the servers for very long. On the plus side, none of our matches were particularly laggy, and selecting created characters was shorter than loading up customized wrestlers in any given SmackDown! vs. Raw match online.

FaceBreaker's best attribute seems to be its tech, which borrows liberally from other EA titles. Its face-creation system, especially the photo creation, appears to be directly ripped from the GameFace feature in Tiger Woods. The ability to upload and download custom boxer faces, as well as video clips of your bouts, are also present in other EA titles. Although here they're structured around a fundmentally flawed boxing game, they're great for a few laughs. Aside from celebrities (and celebu-tantes like Kim Kardashian) included on the disc, you can pick from some of the top-ranked faces online. A quick perusal gave us a variety of politicians, rappers, and professional wrestlers. Many of them looked eerily realistic, including a Dave Chappelle face. We like the created boxers more than some of EA's selections, which feel like a cheap attempt to reach out to casual gamers (reality TV celebs, anyone?).

FaceBreaker is a disappointing attempt to revive the arcade boxer. Granted, it's got some great-looking visuals and a quirky art style that certainly hearkens back to Ready 2 Rumble. Its extra features, such as downloadable boxers, video uploads, and facial scanning tech all work well, as they're borrowed from other solid EA titles. Yet it remains bogged down with completely unbalanced gameplay, maddeningly difficult AI, and online gameplay that has the longevity of a stick of Big Red. That being so, there's nothing worthwhile in the final product that you can't get in the demo.