No review of a SingStar game is complete without highlighting a few key facts about the gameplay itself. The first is disk swapping. After all of this time and all of the promises, you still can’t simply download SingStar: Take That to your hard drive. It also looks like this will probably never be a feature of the series either, with the game now incorporating the ability to swap disks manually by pressing the Select button at the song selection screen without having to turn the console off. While we take this compromise as being better than nothing, it’s still a real shame when track packs for other music games like Rock Band allow you to copy across songs to store on your hard drive without having to muck around with multiple disks. We can only guess that the hurdle for SingStar that other musical games don't have has been with getting the licensing for the film clips, but whatever the reason, it’s still disappointing and really hurts the evolution of the series.
However, the gameplay itself remains as simple and as polished as other SingStar titles. You can sing alone, sing in a head-to-head battle, sing in a duet if the song allows it, pass the microphone and a number of other challenges. To pick a song, you can use the rather gimmicky voice control option, however, for our money it’s much better to let random do the work and belt out whatever musical monstrosity is selected. The core gameplay continues to be a winner and it's a great way to spend an evening with friends or – if you’re so inclined – to sing to your cat, Mr Muffins. Simply match the on-screen pitch and score more points than your opponent, or beat the high scores already set. You do this by matching the on-screen horizontal bars to your pitch, with the lyrics displayed at the bottom of the screen as the song’s music clip plays in the background.
Corey could tell the Tron bikes were close.
You don’t even have to be able to sing – SingStar is a great leveler that rewards your knowledge of a song and its fluctuating pitch. You can even hum into the mic if you get stuck with a tune you don’t recognise, but in our experience doing this is a sure way to start an argument about whether this constitutes ‘cheating’. Hate the game people, not the player. The PlayStation 3 version of the game also supports trophies which is another added bonus for those people that like to display their trophies in their signature blocks on awesome gaming websites.
On to the track pack itself. It’s pretty clear that the SingStar series is popular in the United Kingdom and Europe. While Queen and Abba are UK bands with worldwide appeal and obvious choices for a karaoke experience, the appeal of Take That is somewhat more limited in our opinion. Just so we’re completely fair here, we only recognised a total of three songs from this collection which greatly reduced our ability to sing the songs on the disk and thus impacted on our enjoyment of the experience. This is hardly a surprise as only nine Take That songs charted in the Australian top 40, and only four of them in the top 20. There are also quite a few songs from the post-Robbie Williams reunion era which have failed to make much of an impact in Australia, so Aussie fans will have to take that into consideration. For fans in the UK and other parts of Europe, you may have more idea about the 25 ditties contained below:
• "A Million Love Songs"
• "Babe"
• "Back For Good"
• "Beautiful World"
• "Could It Be Magic"
• "Do What U Like"
• "Everything Changes"
• "Greatest Day"
• "Hold Up A Light
• "I'd Wait for Life"
• "It Only Takes a Minute"
• "Love Ain't Here Anymore"
• "Never Forget"
• "Once You've Tasted Love"
• "Patience"
• "Pray"
• "Promises"
• "Reach Out"
• "Relight My Fire"
• "Rule the World"
• "Said It All"
• "Shine"
• "Sure"
• "Up All Night"
• "Why Can't I Wake Up With You"
It’s incredibly redundant to say that your enjoyment of SingStar: Take That will come down to your enjoyment of both SingStar and the aforementioned boy band, but here we go anyway: "Your enjoyment of SingStar: Take That will come down to your enjoyment of both SingStar and Take That". Fans of the band will delight in singing these tunes with their friends and can easily add two points to this review’s final score. Everyone else will have to weigh up whether 25 tracks by a band with a small window of success outside of the UK for a shade under $50 is a worthwhile purchase.
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