As the name suggests, FaceBreaker isn't a subtle affair. It's an arcade boxing game in which the cartoon boxers' faces get slowly deformed with every punch, so by the end of the bout their noses are somewhere over by their ears and their lips look like bananas.

The gimmick is that you can take a photo of yourself - or indeed anyone - and upload it to the EA servers, from where it can be imported into the game to create your very own digitised boxers. So the next time your taxes go up, you can paste the Chancellor of the Exchequer around the ring to relieve some of your frustrations.

This is a neat innovation, although it means nothing if the actual boxing gameplay is rubbish. There's both good and bad about FaceBreaker's combat engine, but surprisingly it isn't the complete mindless button-masher you'd expect. In fact, the mashers out there are likely to be frustrated by the fact that defence is the key in this game.

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The controls are simple: there's a high punch, a low punch and a power punch, with the right trigger activating blocking. The twist is that holding a punch button down while your opponent steps up to hit you triggers a dodge move, which can be quickly followed by a counter. Mindless punchers will find themselves whiffing air, then receiving countless counter-smacks in the gob, as we did during our first couple of fights against the computer.

We overcame the first opponent in the arcade challenge mode quickly enough, although the second (an obese ninja nerd) took us the best part of an hour to beat, as he has a stun move that we found tricky to evade. FaceBreaker's actually pretty unforgiving, even on the lowest difficulty setting, and until you really learn the ropes of the game's counter-punch system you'll be bounced off the actual ropes time and time again.

It's particularly frustrating when you get trapped in a corner, unable to break away or pull off any sort of a move because you're continually interrupted by the psychotic opponent hammering on your poor old digitised mug. The bouts are three rounds long, with a tie-break at the end during which the CPU seems to turn up the aggression even further, making it seemingly impossible to do anything at times. Our joypad hit the floor a couple of times during this review...

To be fair, FaceBreaker does warn that it's no pushover, and learning how to deal with an opponent's special moves (as well as utilising yours to maximum effect) helps considerably. The computer-controlled boxers are actually well fleshed out, with very different personalities including fast punchers, sluggers, defensive fighters and one complete lunatic who uses sock puppets as boxing gloves.

There's some fun to be had here when you do manage to prevail, but the campaign mode itself is short and flimsy and the fights are often just too annoying. The real action in FaceBreaker is in its multiplayer offerings, with a winner-stays-on competition for up to six players locally, plus an online Xbox Live mode. This is where you'll find the more even fights, although we'd still have welcomed some more options on the multiplayer front.

Although the digitised boxers are a smart idea (and there are plenty of celebs to download and beat to a pulp), FaceBreaker is ultimately very light on options, and boxing against the computer can be a painful slog. With a few drinks on a Saturday night and some mates round, however, there's some punching mileage to be had here.