Hip Hop All Star

The older ones among you may remember a sketch from The Mary Whitehouse Experience, where a cardigan and slacks-wearing dad would mortify his teenage son by dancing like a rutting stag and saying, “Hey! What’s this? It’s got a good beat!”

Well, despite Hip Hop All Star actually demonstrating a decent new twist on the music/rhythm gameplay, it can’t help but make you cringe by trying to sound tragically ‘with it’ - just like Huge Dennis’s cool dad.

But we’ll try not to dwell on the pseudo-teenage banter that's the literary equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard. Fortunately, the bulk of the game isn't focused on talking ‘whack’, but puts you in control of a turntable and a crowd that's just, like, pumped to the max, yo (okay, I'll stop that now).

Like most music/rhythm games, Hip Hop All Star involves hitting buttons as three different notes pass their respective targets. This is a gameplay mechanic that works surprisingly well on the mobile platform, as the keypad is split into three columns to make the controls as accessible as possible.

The difference with Hip Hop All Star is the way in which the notes move around the screen. Rather than moving in a straight line, as normal, these notes rotate around a record on the turntable. This is quite an important aspect to the gameplay, as it essentially adds a difficulty level to each of the three notes.

The green notes around the outside edge of the record move more quickly, though you can see them coming for a longer period. The red notes on the inside, however, move more slowly but are only visible for moments before reaching the target zone. This also means that it's not immediately obvious which note is next, given that they're moving at different speeds.

The music is a little dry and down tempo, given that you're supposed to be working a rave-addled crowd in a club, but the rhythmic nature of this type of dance music actually fits the mobile platform's limited audio abilities better than a midi-driven rock song.