Singstar Ultimate Party Review

Sony’s signature karaoke title Singstar has a lot to live up to just based on its latest name – Singstar: Ultimate Party. Over the years you may have built up quite the Singstar catalogue, hopefully you would think Sony would build upon this and deliver the ultimate karaoke party especially with what the PS4 has to offer. With such happy people on view you’d think Singstar: Ultimate Party would be able to satisfy all your karaoke needs just in time for Christmas.

First of all the usual slick presentation associated with the series is present in Singstar: Ultimate Party. However you’ll quickly find out that there are barely any modes to play with. You would have thought with the increased power of the PS4 this would have led to a surge of additional modes or improvements to old ones but no they’ve actually streamlined Singstar! There’s no Pass the Mic, no Duet mode which is a criminal omission, no shortened song option and the worse thing missing is the lack of a ‘Party’ mode which must be a capital offence considering the game is called Singstar: Ultimate Party! This lack of options doesn’t make any sense, all you can do is take part in a 1 or 2 person song besides the Online Battle. Singstar: Ultimate Party is worse technically than it’s PS3 incarnates, which is quite the accomplishment considering how lacking in technical depth a Singstar game is!

As the saying goes ‘beautiful music is in the ears of the beholder’ (I may have changed that slightly). There are 30 songs on offer that include Ed Sheeran – Lego House, Coldplay -Magic, Lady Gaga – Born This Way, One Direction – Best Song Ever, TLC – No Scrubs, Lionel Ritchie – Hello and Avicii – Hey Brother.

There appears to be focus on the more popular songs of recent times, although the Let it Go version on Singstar: Ultimate Party is performed by Demi Lovato which is sure to disappoint Frozen fans. Obviously you can go buy additional songs, but considering the amount of unused space Singstar: Ultimate Party is not utilising you would have hoped for a larger initial catalogue. You can carry over the songs you bought on the PS3 version, but due to some contractual issues your entire library may not be transferable as of yet which again is a disadvantage for Singstar: Ultimate Party. Also all those PS3 Singstar games you may have gained over the years, well you can’t play them on the PS4, you can only download the songs which are present on the PS4 PSN catalogue.

One good thing about Singstar: Ultimate Party is that if you still have your old microphones you can still use them here. If not you can download the Singstar app and sing to your heart’s content. For some reason it doesn’t sound as loud as it used to which somewhat detracts from the experience, part of the fun was hearing how badly and how badly loud your friends were when they took on a tune that didn’t suit their ‘voice’!  There wasn’t much lag even though you are warned about its possibility by Singstar: Ultimate Party, I’ve never been aware of lag problems on previous games.

It appears that the developers couldn’t be asked to make Singstar: Ultimate Party any better than it’s predecessors, maybe they removed some of the features so they can include better versions on the next game, maybe the modes will be downloadable at a cost. You can’t judge a game on what it might have been or what future developments might be and as such Singstar: Ultimate Party is the poorest Singstar game you would have played. If you like karaoke then Singstar: Ultimate Party is the best karaoke game on the PS4 but that isn’t saying much. If Singstar: Ultimate Party was a singer then it would be comparable to a slick-looking songstress who is only able to belt out a couple of tunes, they sing them well but they’ll never win the local talent show let alone break the top forty.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Sony Playstation 4 code was provided to Bonus Stage for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to press@4gn.co.uk.