Well, I went to the Download Music Festival at Donnington last week and as well as there being a load of brilliant bands and lots of drinking, EA had a thing there with some games. Over the three days of the festival I got to play games while crap bands were on and managed to get a go on Facebreaker. I also got a free copy of Def Jam Icon and cannot decide whether I want to play it or purge it with fire.

Anyways, onto FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEBREEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAKEEEEEEEEERRRRRRR!

There I was wandering away from the Tuborg stage after seeing the first band of download, Zebrahead, when what should I see but I giant EA sign. With my curiosity now getting the better of me, I wander over to see what is going on. They had quite a few games going including stuff like Burnout Paradise, C&C3 Wrath of Kane, Army of Two and some others. What really got my attention was the fighting game on the big screen. I saw two boxers wailing on each other pretty hard and then one of them pulled off a huge final move which basically involved a knee drop from space.

Then some American dude came over over to with a headset on and introduced the game and telling me that it was “a fairly new build from the Vancouver offices” and that this was the first time anyone in Europe had seen it. It was then that I noticed the debug information on the screen and I have to say that at no point during the game play did I see the framerate dip much below 60fps during gameplay. Seeing as it was a newish build and obviously not finished there were some missing sound effects and it froze a little on the character select screen but other than that I saw no problems.

The fighting itself is rather simple. You can either button bash like crazy or learn a little and start using parries and dodging to avoid those harder hits. To win, it is either three knockdowns or a Facebreaker. The fastest I saw somebody win a match was seven seconds and it was pretty amazing. The longest match I saw was the one just before I went to see Children of Bodom and went on for 4 rounds before I finally got the facebreaker in.

The facebreakers themselves are character specific and are awesome. They range from basic kicks to the face and a monkey teabagging the opponent to the aforementioned kneedrop from space. In order to perform them all you need is a number of successful hits in a row without being interrupted and you can even perform them if the other guy is blocking, it just takes longer.

Another cool feature of the game it that you can create you own boxer. The way it gets really cool is that you can use pictures to create the head and then sliders for the body. You can make both male and female boxers and then watch them have their face rearranged but the brutal beating layed out by opponent.

Overall, the game was a hell of a lot of fun and I think I might well be getting it when it comes out depending on funds. No, he did not tell us the release date before you ask.