You want to lose pounds overnight? Forget Wii Fit. Facebreaker: KO Party is the game for you.
As I have said before, the party genre is a type of game that only works with several players – else you won’t have much fun, unless you’re the guy with the Minesweeper addiction. Familiar party titles include Super Smash Bros. and Rock Band. Interestingly, however, this self-proclaimed party game breaks with the trend and can, at times, be quite entertaining on your own (especially if you’re in the mood to pummel something).
In essence, Facebreaker is Wii Sports’ Boxing game with some tweaks. You are not able to control the positioning of your gloves, but you can choose where to move. Instead of unresponsive controls, your enemy doesn’t let you get a punch in. It’s very familiar to Wii Sports gamers.
But don’t think for a minute that it’s not worth getting. Facebreaker is very fun – success depends on your skill at knowing when to dodge, where to aim your parries and just how many punches you can get in before the opponent will swing back. It’s very satisfying to throw a couple of punches, dodge theirs, then swing back with a counter attack, finally finishing with a signature “Breaker”, a move unique to each character that does a deal of damage. Breakers come in several levels – the weakest being a Bone Breaker, useful to break through a block and stun your opponent, all the way to the strongest – the Facebreaker, which automatically ends the match with you as the winner, if it is successful.
Facebreaker felt odd to me the first time I played it. Characters range from a woman straight out of a Japanese fighting game (You know the type – where they’re scantily clad and more ripped than Arnold Schwarzenegger, although this one is British) to a guy who looks and sounds like the Heavy out of Team Fortress 2. There’s even a World of Warcraft obsessed guy who thinks he’s a ninja. Of course, after a couple of rounds in the ring people start to all look rather cartoony, with their faces bashed in and purple lips.
The music tracks, I feel compelled to mention, are completely unknown to me. However, each track sounds very good, and the music fits with Facebreaker’s unique style.
Unfortunately, the game’s single player has one seriously fatal flaw. The AI. Where in the first few levels you completely dominate the enemies, they soon become ridiculously difficult. The game manual states that you can dodge fast jabs – this is occasionally true, but you rarely dodge when you tell it to, the Wii irritatingly focusing on a random dodging approach that makes it feel like it’s laughing at you. In the second boss fight, for example, I was winning – I’d knocked my opponent down twice, once more to win, when suddenly I was unable to dodge, move, or strike my opponent. It was suddenly 2-1, then 2-2 without me scoring a single hit. Then we went into sudden death mode – next KO wins – and my opponent is suddenly the Flash, moving at ten times my speed and able to kill me in 2 and a half hits. After 8 tries at this – yes, 8 tries – I finally managed to take out “Voodoo” with my Russian “I’m not a Heavy, see, I got no minigun” friend called Molotov. Having unlocked Voodoo for my own use, I challenged Voodoo with Voodoo. Guess what? The computer still won.
But it’s still a fun game. If you want to look like Molotov, forget the gym. Buy Facebreaker: KO Party, and play it for 3 hours straight. See where it gets you.
Nometet.com says: 
+Great fun
+Funny characters
+Facial destruction
-Unbeatable bosses
-Graphics still look Wii tastic
