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Hip-Hop Hooray! ...but not really
posted by Twizlex (DAUPHIN, PA) Mar 7, 2007
Member since Jul 2006
26 out of 34 gamers (76%) found this review helpful
Simply put, this game is not as good as the last game, Def Jam: Fight for New York. It looks great and has some innovative music stuff, but it's significantly lacking in the fighting department, which is a total bummer considering this is supposed to be a fighting game. It seems they concentrated so much on the music aspect that the fighting is almost an afterthought.
The basic gameplay is this: beat guys up to beat of the song. It's a fresh idea, I'll admit, but doesn't seem to work very well in practice. Maybe it's just my whiteness and accompanied lack of rhythm that's the problem, but I've played other music style games without any hiccups. The issue here is that pushing buttons to try to punch a dude's face at the same time as the bass beats just doesn't work like it should. You can also jiggle the analog stick to "scratch" the song all DJ like but that never seemed to help me either.
Icon definitely seems like a step in the wrong direction when compared to Fight for New York. There's no HUD, no health meters, and no special fighting moves or techniques other than punching and kicking and some mediocre grabs. It's much more realistic in terms of the moves, but also a lot less fun. It has fewer battlegrounds and fewer playable characters than Fight for NY, and it also doesn't have any female characters. I enjoyed beating people up as Carmen Electra and now I can't.
It's sorta fun to beat down fools online, and the ability to use your own songs in the game would be neat if it actually worked correctly. You can't "scratch" custom songs, and the beats don't seem to register as well as the in-game songs. Sometimes a gas tank will explode nowhere near a bass beat and make me wonder if it just blows up at scheduled intervals instead.
Basically, if you like fighting games, you MIGHT like this, but anyone that really loved the last game will probably be disappointed. I'd only recommend Icon to people who are really into hip-hop music. Overall it's just OK.
The basic gameplay is this: beat guys up to beat of the song. It's a fresh idea, I'll admit, but doesn't seem to work very well in practice. Maybe it's just my whiteness and accompanied lack of rhythm that's the problem, but I've played other music style games without any hiccups. The issue here is that pushing buttons to try to punch a dude's face at the same time as the bass beats just doesn't work like it should. You can also jiggle the analog stick to "scratch" the song all DJ like but that never seemed to help me either.
Icon definitely seems like a step in the wrong direction when compared to Fight for New York. There's no HUD, no health meters, and no special fighting moves or techniques other than punching and kicking and some mediocre grabs. It's much more realistic in terms of the moves, but also a lot less fun. It has fewer battlegrounds and fewer playable characters than Fight for NY, and it also doesn't have any female characters. I enjoyed beating people up as Carmen Electra and now I can't.
It's sorta fun to beat down fools online, and the ability to use your own songs in the game would be neat if it actually worked correctly. You can't "scratch" custom songs, and the beats don't seem to register as well as the in-game songs. Sometimes a gas tank will explode nowhere near a bass beat and make me wonder if it just blows up at scheduled intervals instead.
Basically, if you like fighting games, you MIGHT like this, but anyone that really loved the last game will probably be disappointed. I'd only recommend Icon to people who are really into hip-hop music. Overall it's just OK.