Just SING! Vol. 2

There's an issue that plagues the singing game genre regardless of platform: they have no single-player appeal.

So when Just SING! Vol. 2 dropped through the letterbox for the Nintendo DS - a system that by its very nature provides personal game experiences - alarm bells started ringing.

Engine Software has gone a long way towards addressing this fundamental issue, though Just SING! Vol. 2 is not the SingStar equivalent you might be looking for.

Just SING mode is your typical karaoke single-player offering. It gives you 19 tracks to warble along to. If you've played Lips or Rock Band you'll know the deal: the game tracks your pitch and scores how well you stay in tune, as lyrics are presented on-screen.

In this sense it's technically strong, providing feedback in the form of bars that fill when you're in the right key. It appears to fudge a few notes if you're a little off, no doubt due to the hardware's rudimentary microphone, but for the most part it's spot-on.

When the song is over you're scored and you move on to the next track until you get bored, switch the system off, and do something else. So far, so uninspired.

Multiplayer comes in the form of pass-and-play on a single device, with you and up to three friends taking turns. Or, if you have another system and copy of the game, you can face off against another player remotely.

It's highly unlikely that you'll make use of these competitive features, of course. It's difficult to imagine a situation in which you'll take turns singing into a DS while your friends watch on patiently, let alone organise an entire session with a pal who's brought his copy along too.

Perhaps if you have young children who are into singing it will get some use - otherwise it's a needless addition.

What will get some use is the Challenge mode, which takes the form of a set of tasks that you have to complete while a song is playing.

From challenging you to make it through a session without lyrics or notation to completing a cappella routines and deliberately singing off-key, they change the method in which you approach a piece in novel little ways.

These unlock extra costumes for your avatar to wear – no music videos here, unfortunately – as well as new venues to sing at, many of which take advantage of the DSi's camera to display your face on video walls during sets.

It adds longevity, meaning, and goals to an otherwise aimless release, keeping budding pop stars busy as they practise tunes over and over.

But with fewer than 20 pop numbers to stretch your vocal muscles to, the library wears pretty thin pretty fast. It's also not a great selection for a game that aims itself at a modern mainstream audience.

Yes, there's Lady GaGa's 'Bad Romance' and Owl City's 'Fireflies', but there's also Milow's 'You Don't Know' and The Cardigans's 'Lovefool'. They're all decent enough to sing along to, but there's no cohesion of choice to root the release in a specific genre.

The music is sampled at a high bit-rate, coming through clean and crisp, though effects are abrasive. The effect of a crowd cheering or singing along to a number is horrifyingly scratchy.

The ticker that sounds as your score is counted at a session's end also seems to have been pulled from a stock library of original Game Boy bleeps, jarring against the faultless music that went before.

For the surely inevitable third volume, Engine Software needs to raise its game by securing more music or focussing on a particular sub-genre of pop, to make this truly essential for amateur Madonnas.

That said, this is a valiant effort at making a traditionally party-orientated product more compelling for solo artists, making the most of its rather paltry amount of audio content.