Def Jam Rapstar Impressions

October 12, 2010 | Nash | One Comment

I picked up Rapstar this week and thought that people on the fence would like some impressions.  Bulleted (no pun intended) for your pleasure.

• There is a Career, Party, and Freestyle mode. Career mode is basically a way to unlock stuff including a few songs.  Work your way through all of the songs to unlock everything.  Pretty basic stuff.  Party mode opens up all of the songs except for the locked songs that require some time in the career mode to unlock.  The three gameplay choices of solo, duet, and battle are good.  In solo and battle, you handle everything on your own.  Obviously solo is solo, and battle is a 2 player mode that scores both performances with the high score winning.  And when I say everything, that includes singing hooks and getting scored on pitch.  There are parts that unexpectedly turn into singing, like Kanye’s verse on Slow Jamz and some of Ja’s lyrics on Always on Time.  Since they are pretty much singing, I think this is acceptable.  The duet mode allows each player to choose who they want to perform as on the songs where it applies.  On songs with a lot of rappers and no significant hook vocals, it usually lets both players split each rappers verse and take turns.  My girlfriend likes to sing, so she sang all of the hooks while I handled the rhymes.  This was pretty fun.  And she was surprisingly good on the rapping parts!  We had a lot of fun with the duet mode.  Freestyle mode is basically some beats that you can rhyme over and post on the internet for the world to laugh at in the Community section.

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