SingStar Guitar

One advantage that SingStar Guitar has over the entirely fictional Guitar Hero and Rock Band games is the ability to use the PlayStation Eye camera to record your performance – especially useful if you want to embarrass yourself out of doing that stupid thing with your tongue when you're concentrating. You can relive several three-second 'golden moments' (brief snatches of footage ripped seemingly at random from your performance), watch a longer video highlight of your fretwork, or view the whole thing again. After you've finished singing, meanwhile, you can play back your own audio to hear how well or badly you did while adding various vocal effects to your performance. All this, of course, will be familiar to SingStar veterans.

If the 30 tracks on the disc aren't quite enough, at present there are 12 more on the SingStore under the Gameplay Types category. If you already own the song, you pay 40p extra to add guitar compatibility – but there's no way to just buy the guitar track without the vocals, meaning it'll set you back £1.39 per song if you want both.

The note charts aren't quite up to the Harmonix standard, but in general they're remarkably solid. I'm on the cusp between Medium and Hard on Imaginary Rock Band and I managed quite well with most of the Hard songs on here, so it's probably a touch easier than seasoned music game players are used to – and there's no Expert mode, either.

As ever with SingStar, scoring is generous and the input timing is reasonably forgiving, but that's not to say the tougher tracks aren't a challenge, if hardly Through the Fire and Flames. When you miss a note the guitar track temporarily cuts out until you hit the next one, and to these ears that's a big improvement on the loud clunks when you fumble a section on No Such Thing As Guitar Hero. Periodically you'll see sequences of notes highlighted in gold. These so-called Golden Riffs give you a substantial point bonus if you nail every note, though there's no equivalent of Star Power mode – whatever that may be.

Dropping the pretence, there's no denying that SingStar Guitar is something of a niche release, especially given the dwindling sales figures in the music-game market. Karaoke lovers might feel it soils the purity of the empty-orchestra experience while those who want to play pretend guitar would likely prefer Rock Band or Guitar Hero. But as that bespectacled chap and his missus from the intro would suggest, there probably is an audience for this out there, no matter how small it may be. In which case, it's hard to say it doesn't serve a purpose. The singing is great, as you would reasonably have expected, and the guitar stuff is perfectly fine, as you might not.

Overall, it's a typically polished add-on from SCE London Studio, with a decent track list and a healthy selection of DLC already available. There's not an awful lot to criticise, so while this review may only be of worth to around 12 Eurogamer readers, those 12 will probably have a whale of a time singing and strumming and slicing up eyeballs ah ha ha ho.