In a karaoke game like Singstar Rocks!, of course the main focus aside from gameplay will be music. Unlike the Karaoke Revolution series (which Singstar Rocks! will be continually compared to, so get used to it) that opts to go for some modern music mixed with a really healthy dose of ballads and karaoke classics that you'd hear in any karaoke bar in America, Singstar Rocks! definitely goes more for "fun" songs. Stuff you love to belt out at the top of your lungs in your car, not songs that showcase your vocal talent. Songs like "Dance, Dance" by Fallout Boy and "Song 2" by Blur - hell, you can't even figure out what the words are half the time, but the songs are admittedly a blast.

The songs are showcased against the music videos for the corresponding tune, so that is a bit distracting, especially if you don't know the song by heart. "Dance, Dance" is especially annoying as the video tells a story and the song breaks several times at inopportune moments to tell more of the video-story and there you are, belting out the rest of the song only to see that the music has stopped and the video is doing its thing. And then, just that quick, the song kicks back in. ARGH!!!

There are classic songs like Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive", Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama", Aretha Franklin's "Respect" and Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" along with modern hits like KT Tunstall's "Black Horse and a Cherry Tree" and The Killers "Somebody Told Me", plus some Keane, Bloc Party, The Offspring and Good Charlotte thrown in for good measure.

Let me first say this - I am a huge fan of karaoke games and specifically, the Karaoke Revolution series. I was highly anticipating Singstar Rocks! because of my love for karaoke games and when I finally got it, I was really disappointed. Yes, the game comes with a ton of modern hits, some that are really fun to sing. Yes, it comes with two really high quality microphones, very heavy and solid feeling in the hands. But what really killed this title for me was its interface, which I will get into more later on in the review.

Singstar Rocks! is a karaoke game and as such, the songs play and you sing, hopefully in pitch. However, unlike Karaoke Revolution, you don't pick a character or avatar to represent yourslef as a player, you simply enter your name. You can opt to play by yourself, on a team, or battle against one person. Again, unlike KR, there are no songs to unlock, no levels to progress through - all of the songs are displayed for you to choose from right at the beginning, so there is no impetus to complete each and every song to see what comes next.

The songs are on a carousel and loosely sectioned into types such as Indie, Rock, Classic, etc. and there is also a medley of each genre included as well. If you are playing by yourself, you simply enter your name and pick a song and go from there. You are ranked upon completion of the song based on how well you did. Better pitch yields a higher score.

When you play Singstar Rocks! as a party game, it's called Pass the Mic and you can select from a number of play types. In Battle, each player sings the same song and the one with the highest score wins. In Medley, same deal but with a medley of similar genre songs. In First to the Post, whoever hits 5000 points first in a Battle wins. In Duet, two players sing together for a combined score. Keep It Up has players from teams trying to keep the performance bar above a certain level. Micro-Medley is a hideous game where you sing a tiny portion of a song and then jump to a tiny portion of another song and so on. God only knows where you might be thrown into the song, so you had better have every song memorized. Or better yet, just don't play this one. Then finally, there's Pass the Mic where each member of the team sings for a selected length of the song and then passes the mic off to the next person.

You can choose from Easy, Medium and Hard and the differences are how harshly you will be scored. On Easy, the pitch bars are much larger meaning you don't have to be exact in your performance, whereas that ramps up a great deal on Medium and especially Hard. However, what makes the game the most difficult is the fact that the interface is not very user friendly. The words appear at the bottom of the screen a short bit before you are required to sing them, then your pitch bar is at the middle to top of the screen. I don't know about you, but I find it pretty hard to focus my attention on perfecting a song while having to keep my eyes in two separate places. In fact, unless you know the song lyrics perfectly, you can forget about doing well. I guess that's why there is a Freestyle mode, so you can practice. Unfortunately, I didn't find the game fun enough to want to.

I'll say it again, the interface on Singstar Rocks! is what killed it for me. Maybe I have become too spoiled by Karaoke Revolution with its seemingly perfect interface, but I hated the words being completely separate from the pitch bars. Again, although the words appear a little bit prior to your needing to sing them, unless you are focusing on those words, you might miss a start to a song.

Another annoying thing was the fact that the length of the pitch bars really wasn't indicative of the length of a word or phrase. So if you don't know a song, it's fairly pointless to even try to sing it before you learn it. The interface doesn't help you in any way by giving you at least a clue as to how to sing the sing if you don't already know it. When I'd encounter parts of songs or even entire songs that I didn't know (such as in a Medley challenge), I often found it more cathartic to simply curse in time to the music. Maybe that's just me.

If you've always wanted to get into karaoke but haven't tried it yet and you really dig modern rock and indie tracks, Singstar Rocks! might be the game for you. However, if you've been spoiled by the Karaoke Revolution interface, I don't recommend this game. All it did was frustrate me. I do still kind of look forward to Singstar on the PS3 since you can select your own music. I highly encourage the developers to perhaps include a scant few songs on board and then allow players to select the remainder of the songs themselves.