Developer Summary:

“Breaking The Rules” is a third-person action/fighting game. Game is mainly played as a brawl, ( but can also be played in the classic 1 vs 1 mode ). Fights can happen local ( up to 4 players on the same machine ) or multi-player up to 12 players. The game is 100% physic based, one still standing, and totally fallen in 8 of the most beautiful locations in the city of Rome faithfully reproduced.

What We Think:

Breaking the Rules feels a bit like Urban Reign; the fighting shares similar techniques but includes a unique twist with each character, all of whom resemble a cultural icon from between the 70’s and 2000’s. Thus far I have been able to identify T-Dog who has the history of B.A. Baracus and looks like Mr. T. and has a good balance between average kicks and average punches, and Mickey, who looks exactly like Mike Tyson, right down to the tattoos, and who shares his upper body strength. He is weak in kicks but makes up for it in punching.

Next up we have Xaio – a Chinese female assassin with some deadly kick combos at the expense of any decent punching combos – and who is also one of my favorite characters to play.

Other characters include Lucia – a tough but cultured kick-boxer, Otto, the tough son of a Nazi German, Tony, a hardcore punk rock Eco-terrorist, an Italian gang ‘hooligan’ named Paolino and finally Pete – a trans-gender bisexual who use to be a professional wrestler. All of these characters have different attacks and combos that set them apart from the rest and thus the style with which you prefer to fight should be considered when choosing your avatar.

The Battle

If you don’t have a controller for a PC you will wish you did; this is a game wherein the AI has no problem taking you out, and with a keyboard you will begin to feel there is an unfair disadvantage.

This game has support for xinput and directinput controllers, meaning no matter what kind of game pad or game controller you plug in, it should support it pretty well. I played this game with only a few characters having a full move list. Xaio, whom as I mentioned was my preferred fighter to play, was not yet in the manual. Playing for a few days without knowing all the moves in fact made it a lot more fun than studying all the combos beforehand.

The modes in this game range from 8 person FFA (12 players online) to 1 vs 1. There is also 2 vs all and 1 vs all. When you start playing with more than three players at once it can get a tad buggy; minor irks like grazing an opponent as you miss a punch can still result in full-on contact, or where sometimes you may completely miss when you know you hit. In my experience, however, such occurrences were few and far between and never really turned the tide of the match.

The graphics are decent: they resemble an early 2000’s video game which have always been fine with me. I have never been one to pick on a game because the graphics aren’t on par with Crysis. I also liked the fact that weapons and combos are physics-driven, which includes certain set-pieces and props.

Each level is unique in design and they blend together quite well, so when you play on a bridge level then the next level is next to some apartments, it feels like the same city, which in this case happens to be Rome. As each map is modeled after the fine Italian metropolis, I can overlook how similar the levels may appear.

FINISH HIM!

Though it doesn’t quite reach the same high standards, the game resembles Mortal Kombat, but it has a lot of promise and a very dedicated team behind it. I have been looking forward to a solid new fighting game on PC, and found BTR rather addictive. For those hungry for Mortal Kombat to come to PC, this will hold you over until Boon (the executive producer of the Mortal Kombat series) finally decides to port it to PC, and, with the promised patches (see below) it could even become a good replacement if Boon decides to keep Mortal Kombat 9 console-exclusive.

About the developer

BTR Studios is an Italian game studio that is introducing their first game Breaking The Rules to the world on June 12th 2011. They’re a very outgoing studio that has already promised two major updates, the first arriving at the end of the month to fix any post-release glitches and bugs and another by year’s end to add at least 8 new characters and 4 new levels.

BTR intend to continue the series with Europe and World Tournament editions. In a recent e-mail they had mentioned that “we have a lot of ideas like bazookas and cars” and that depending on the reception of the game, the updates could come sooner.

Offical Site

Rating: