Much has been made over the increasingly blurred lines between videogames and cinema.
Although for every Heavy Rain and Uncharted 2, they are inevitably and overwhelmingly outnumbered by a Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within or Tron: Legacy The Video Game.
So after countless poor, pretentious and pants attempts at artfully merging the two, we’d like to gleefully welcome Yoostar 2.
While it’s in no danger of being labelled as that first ‘p’, the advertised schtick (put YOURSELF in the movies) certainly felt like it could lean towards the other two.
And while it’s not ‘poor’, it’s definitely pants.
But in a naffly great kind of way.
Yoostar 2 is yet another example of using the Kinect and Playstation Eye’s incredible technology to fairly interactive but not entirely satisfying effect. You stand in front of the camera, and it scans in your features and gets rid of all the background details, thus allowing you to act out key scenes from classic (and some decidedly not-so-classic) movies, utilising a Singstar-style beat marker to help you nail the lines and the timing.
Which means you too can re-enact famous scenes from a host of timeless films, including The Wizard of Oz, Kick-Ass, The Godfather, Forest Gump and, erm, Norbit.
On paper, it’s great. And in practice, at least initially, it’s pretty cool. The tech is unarguably impressive, but – as pithily referred to earlier – it’s less a game as it is an interactive camera. Which means that once you’ve cut and pasted yourself into the scenes (which are fairly short in themselves), there’s simply nowhere else for it to go despite boasting 80 films scenes to choose from.
Still, as an entertaining party game diversion, it’s schtick does what it says on the tin, and amusingly so.
[Rating:3/5]
Yoostar 2 is on General Release now, and available on Xbox 360 and PS3.
