Lips: Shallow style and pizzazz

There's no denying "Lips" has style. Microsoft's attempt to draw more casual players to the Xbox 360 with a "Singstar" competitor features hefty, glowing, motion sensive mics and visuals, easy jump-in co-op, a clean iPod-esque interface, and visuals that range from musicvideos to trippy ambient designs.

But as Variety critic Leigh Alexander notes, it's rather shallow, with a poor selection of songs and an import function that's just plain broken:

"Lips" eschews timeless karaoke favorites in favor of an odd blend so dispersed across genres that each player's taste is likely to find only a couple of desirables out of a list of 40 titles that run the gamut from A-Ha's "Take on Me" through perplexing, ultra-current one-hit-wonders like Sara Bareilles' "Love Song."  The box promises more songs available via download, but there aren't many just yet, and no must-haves, which looks grim for "Lips" when you contrast it with "SingStar," which has such a massive song library that Sony had to build a separate, iTunes-esque online store to house them all.

"Lips" promised to make up for that shortcoming through an innovative feature that lets players import songs from an iPod or other MP3 player, tone down the singer's voice and "freestyle" to the music even if the lyric data isn't available. But the feature barely functions. Not only does it require the music player to be attached to the console at all times (as opposed to actually transferring files), but this reviewer couldn't get a single song from the iPod to work in "Lips," even though the game was able to recognize them and add them to the track list.

Leigh also notes that while "Lips" works easily as a party game (assuming you like music on the disc), there's really no challenge for anyone used to crooning in "Rock Band" or "Guitar Hero: World Tour." Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but may limit the appeal a bit. Especially since those two games work just as well for parties with non-gamers as for the hardcore types alone at 3AM with nobody they have to worry about waking.

Full review: Lips