SingStar: Ultimate Party Reviews
It's a shame that such a much-loved series has come to this, but here we are. So to conclude, SingStar Ultimate Party gets one point for nice menu screens and one point for Carly Rae Jepsen. As for you, Sony, it's time to ring the French polishers.
SingStar: Ultimate Party is a huge step back for the series, ditching all of the elements that made it a party staple and offering little in the way of variety, or support for any previous SingStar games.
Singstar Ultimate Party completely fails to move with the times, with an overall karaoke package that is inferior to the 2004 blueprint.
Still the best competitive Karaoke franchise on the market, this latest version fails to impress with a lack of game modes, mobile app connection issues and the inability to download all the tunes you want on PS4, or transfer some of them from older versions of the game.
While the game deserves some credit for its presentation and use of companion apps, all the beer in the world wouldn't be enough to prevent your party guests from piling into an early cab if you subjected them to an evening of this.
So, to sum up what SingStar: Ultimate Party is I can safely say what it is not. It is not the ultimate party. If it were, life would be very dull indeed. What it is is a way to collate certain music videos in one place in exchange for payment as opposed to finding them for free via various other methods. It's a chance to sing into your smartphone rather than hear singing from it and a chance to see shapes turn blue or gold or stay white. It's a chance to record yourself singing without pressing play on the video recorder and a chance to have other people you don't know rate your singing to prove once and for all to your wife/mother/friends that you bloody well can sing. Does all of that make the game worth playing? Not a chance.
So, Singstar Ultimate Party offers a great karaoke experience with an impressive choice of tracks, whether or not you choose to supplement the 30 on-disc songs with DLC. But you may want to hold on to your old mics, because the Singstar Mic app tries its best to ruin the whole experience. Here's hoping those problems get sorted out.
Singstar Ultimate Party definitely misses the mark when it comes to all the bells and whistles from the Singstar franchise. Sure the gameplay is sturdy and the voice recognition is pretty much flawless but it's missing the heart and soul of what made this series so good. Yes it's cool that you can use your mobile phone as a microphone and that you can share your videos with social media but regrettably that's about it.