Let me first say this - I am a huge fan of karaoke games and specifically, the
Karaoke Revolution series. I was highly anticipating
Singstar Rocks! because of my love for karaoke games and when I finally got it, I was really disappointed. Yes, the game comes with a ton of modern hits, some that are really fun to sing. Yes, it comes with two really high quality microphones, very heavy and solid feeling in the hands. But what really killed this title for me was its interface, which I will get into more later on in the review.
Singstar Rocks! is a karaoke game and as such, the songs play and you sing, hopefully in pitch. However, unlike Karaoke Revolution, you don't pick a character or avatar to represent yourslef as a player, you simply enter your name. You can opt to play by yourself, on a team, or battle against one person. Again, unlike KR, there are no songs to unlock, no levels to progress through - all of the songs are displayed for you to choose from right at the beginning, so there is no impetus to complete each and every song to see what comes next.
The songs are on a carousel and loosely sectioned into types such as Indie, Rock, Classic, etc. and there is also a medley of each genre included as well. If you are playing by yourself, you simply enter your name and pick a song and go from there. You are ranked upon completion of the song based on how well you did. Better pitch yields a higher score.
When you play Singstar Rocks! as a party game, it's called Pass the Mic and you can select from a number of play types. In Battle, each player sings the same song and the one with the highest score wins. In Medley, same deal but with a medley of similar genre songs. In First to the Post, whoever hits 5000 points first in a Battle wins. In Duet, two players sing together for a combined score. Keep It Up has players from teams trying to keep the performance bar above a certain level. Micro-Medley is a hideous game where you sing a tiny portion of a song and then jump to a tiny portion of another song and so on. God only knows where you might be thrown into the song, so you had better have every song memorized. Or better yet, just don't play this one. Then finally, there's Pass the Mic where each member of the team sings for a selected length of the song and then passes the mic off to the next person.
