Lips (Xbox 360) Review

The run up to Christmas saw many different “party” games hitting consoles left, right and center. One of Microsoft’s sure-fire hits was Lips…….But did it set the world on fire. This would be Microsoft’s foray into karaoke territory, one that SONY had already begun capturing in 2004. Is the 360 too late for the party? In my opinion, yes.

Getting straight to the point, it’s… average at the very most. The track list is pretty poor really, with only a few stand out party tracks. Seeing as this is a “party” game I honestly thought they would’ve added more girl bands/boy bands and other cheesy pop, songs that people would feel comfortable singing. But unfortunately, they give us tracks that people will struggle to sing along to, who in the world can actually sing Leona Lewis’ bleeding love?

I had a laugh to start with singing along with AHA and The Kooks but upon passing the mic to my wife along with the control pad, she proceeded to scroll through the set list, pass the mic and pad back to me and state that she couldn’t sing any of the songs. This has me wondering, Did INIS even do any research as to who would be playing the game or what people would want to sing?? Even if they’d just approached staff in Karaoke bar and asked for the top 20 requested songs, it would’ve helped.

Anyway, track list aside (hopefully this won’t be an issue with downloadable content and song packs in the future) the game is fun and has a great mechanic to rating your voice and performance. the motion sensing microphones seem a bit pointless and come across as a rip off of star power from the guitar hero games. It basically triggers a stream of notes that gain you more points, by posing with the mic in awkward positions. The game awards you medals for having good pitch or rhythm so it’s fun to see what you get with progression through the game. It is fun to see how many medals you can gain throughout a song, particularly if you did well. It gives you a sense of pride and you can try and best your own scores.

Rather than full online play, there is a challenge mode. This is where you pick somebody from your friends list and challenge them to a song. you both get two tries at the song to see who gets the highest score and the person who does, wins the challenge. It’s quite simple and can get competitive quickly. The only problem with this is that you both have to own the same song, so downloadable content can only be used if you’ve both purchased it through the marketplace. This obviously limits the selection to the 40 songs on the disc.

The other multi-player options are mini game based. An example of this is a game where you and a friend have a mic each and you are both represented by two lovers on the screen. The aim is to sing well enough to build up a meter, which is then triggered by striking a pose with the microphone. If you time it right between you the lovers embrace and you score a point. They’re all quite pointless mini games and it’s just a bit of silly fun if you’ve got friends round, let’s be honest if you’re playing a karaoke game you’ll be up for silly games.

Onto some bad points, even though the voice recognition is good, there can be a terrible amount of lag between you and the 360 which scores you down. example being, even if you start singing the first word of a sentence before it comes up on the screen, it doesn’t always pick it up, which means you lose points. you can play around with the lag on the pause menu, but it doesn’t really help that much.

Second major problem that’s very apparent, when this game was being promoted, it was banded about that you could upload your own songs from CD, Ipod etc and sing along to them. Indeed you can, but the songs will have no lyrics, so it will have to be a song you know very well and the game scans the music as well as the singing in your track. So when there’s no singing you can basically sing the music or “beat box” to it and gain a stupid amount of points, it’s akin to humming along to the first few editions of Sing Star in order to pass the songs. This makes adding your own songs a bit of a let down. However when you add a track the game sends information on the song to Microsoft. I’m hoping that this will show the developers what people are adding, so they might add lyrics via a patch/update.

In summary I would say it’s worth getting if you have people over a lot and enjoy a good old fashioned sing along, but it might be worth waiting until it’s inevitable price drop. At least that way you can use the money you save to download some decent songs from the marketplace upon loading it up and to be fair at 160 points per song, you’ll need some spare points. If you don’t own a PS2 or PS3 and want to play a game like singstar, then this is a great game to get.

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