SingStar Ultimate Party has a simpler design than recent instalments but adds a fresh twist to the business of displaying song lyrics and judging how accurately you reproduce them. Now you can download a microphone app for your Android or iPhone, or dispense with mics entirely and sing to the PlayStation Eye camera, which makes a handy, excruciatingly embarrassing record of your drunken efforts. You can also replace your friends’ faces with weird-looking pop singing avatars, although that seems to sap much of the accidental comedy out of your Carly Rae Jepsen renditions.
ALSO OUT THIS WEEK
Fantasia: Music Evolved, Xbox 360 & Xbox One
Fantasia: Music Evolved is a rhythm action game that uses Xbox’s failure-prone Kinect. Sensibly, it’s very forgiving, letting you miss each cue slightly and still be rewarded as though you’d done it perfectly. It also gets you to use broad movements unsubtle enough to stand a chance of detection by Kinect’s capricious motion sensors. The magic, though, comes from its carefully chosen tunes, which, when combined with choreographed arm movements and sparkly Disney graphics, manage to make you feel part of music that includes Mussorgsky’s Night On Bald Mountain and Bohemian Rhapsody. Its remix mode turns Mozart into muzak, but apart from that everything else about it is spot on.
Microsoft, £34.99-£39.99
Godus: Weyworld Update, Android, iOS & PC
Following its initial underwhelming release, Godus – the free-to-play game where you are the Almighty – has benefited from a major update. Now you can discover the site of an ark, which you build, stock with supplies and followers, then sail to Weyworld, where you’ll find some interesting new rules: in the reboot, each settlement you build increases the cost of the next one, making you think more carefully about what to construct. The limited supply of resources enforces a slower, more cautious style of play. Although Godus is clearly still in development, it is gradually evolving into a more focused, challenging and entertaining game.
22Cans, free
