Face Breaker

Okay, so Sparrow is way different than ICE. She's, uhm, she's cold and calculating? I think that's actually the description we use for ICE. Hold on. Let me compose myself. Sparrow doesn't brook any nonsense, okay? You want to fight, she's right there, and she'll clean your clock and beat you down and generally just make you feel small and unimportant. Also any other euphemisms I can come up with for getting your business ruined. I'll break down how to take her out though, and then you'll be wondering why she was so hard before. The key to beating Sparrow is that you can't fight her on the inside. Inside, she's fast and tricky, and she does her best to make you slip up. Whenever possible, you need to throw her away from you and force separation. Any time she's at separation, she'll try to dash attack you (and she'll almost always do it with a high hook, too). You've gotta watch her hands and put up that defense, catch her as she comes Read More

The Brawl for it All is kind of difficult. I'm not ashamed to admit that. It's pretty hard. That's so we can really measure who's taken the lessons of the game to heart. But if you're having trouble dishing out the pain, that's okay too. I'll walk you through how to school each of the different characters over the next short while. Grab a seat and sit back and listen. ICE is a tricky one. He's the first real challenge of the game (the first belt is just a check to see if you are actually a human being capable of pressing buttons). You can't beat him by just mashing over and over again. It'll do a little bit of a damage, and you might even knock him down, but it's not going to be substantial. To beat ICE, you need to do two things. First, you need to be deliberate about your attacks, and use charged punches whenever possible to soften him up. Second, you need to follow up those charged punches with a fancy breaker. If you time it right, your charged Read More

This weekend Todd, Greg and I were down in Seattle for the annual Penny Arcade Expo. It's a giant consumer gaming show, put on by the excellent folks at Penny Arcade . We had a couple of kits set up with FaceBreaker, and we got to spend some time with people showing them how the game worked. This is extremely gratifying to do, because almost everyone had a great time playing. Seeing someone enjoying themselves playing a game you worked on is probably my favourite part about working in this industry. This was also good fodder for my belief that if you just spend the time with the game, you'll probably like it. I know it's a lot to ask of people to dig a little deeper and look under the surface, but there's a really fun game there. I wouldn't say that if I didn't believe it was true. FaceBreaker comes out in just a couple of days, so I hope you'll take my advice to heart. Cheers.

Hey everyone I'm Todd, lead designer on FaceBreaker. As Tom mentioned we will be starting to post here regularly now that the game is about to be released. We will also be posting and answering your questions here after the game ships and you are all getting your faces broken. For my first blog I'd like to clear up just one thing: the fact that this game was made by the team that made FNR3 is not entirely correct. It’s true, some of the team that worked on that game did come over to FaceBreaker. But a large portion of that team has continued on with the FightNight franchise and are now hard at work on FNR4. I actually played FNR4 last week and it is already looking and playing awesome. For the record, though, I can’t tell you anything more about it than that. So don’t ask. Now listen up: FaceBreaker is in no way meant to replace Fight Night. Other than the fact that everyone in our game wears boxing gloves and fights in a ring, there are really no similarities Read More

I'm not any good at introductions, so I'll just spit it out: my name is Tom Munro, and I'm a designer on FaceBreaker. Myself and the lead designer on the project, Todd Batty, are going to start posting on here with some regularity. We've been drumming up discussion around the 'net, trying to get a feel for what people think of the game. We'd like to do the same here, and so I'm going to start things off with a bit of an open-ended question that I hope you'll respond to. What did you think of the demo? What did you like, what did you dislike, what were you expecting... all of these kinds of things are good to know, and hopefully we can take some of your feedback to our next endeavours. Also, how awesome is the sell-text on Xbox LIVE? I love that description.