Lips, the latest in a long line of party games designed to make you parade a lack of musical talent in front of people in public, is a schizophrenic mixture of innovation and an almost blind, willing lack of understanding of the market. Yes, it serves perfectly well as a karaoke game. You sing, there's special moves, your friends laugh at you. But as a game that you play, with friends and in person, it has nothing at all.

Weirdly, the fun in Lips does not come from warbling along with pop music. It is an exercise in conformity, a harsh singing teacher. As soon as you drop all notions that the game is about anything other than getting every note, hitting every drop or raise in pitch, the quicker you will begin to enter into the rather ruthless competition this game engenders.

Or perhaps I'm approaching it with too hardcore a mindset. Because this game is not difficult, challenging, or hard in any way. You can max out top ranks in short hours of playing. If you were so inclined, you could see it as a cheap, quick and effective way to up your GamerScore without having to put any effort whatsoever.

OK, so Lips is going up against Sony’s SingStar series, which is the proverbial 500 pound gorilla. Is it, to coin a truly ridiculous phrase, the SingStar Killer? Well, no. Lips does quite a few things right, but it just doesn't go far enough to really nail the number one contender's spot.

First, the playing. If you're familiar with karaoke, you'll know the basics and if you've played karaoke games, even more so. You sing along with a song, looking to match pitch, tone and rhythm. Pretty simple and, for the exhibitionistic amongst us, a delight, especially in public.

What it gets right is its most visible assets, the microphones. Big heavy flashing things, have no fear your drunken and dystrophic friends will smash them underfoot while suddenly vomiting while belting out Khe Sahn for the 30th time. Sturdy, looking good, with glowing lights built in for that 'disco-biscuit turn off the lights freakout hour' ambience, they feel good in the hand. Better yet, they can survive the constant flicking and flailing the game will put your poor wrists through.

The motion-sensitive mics are used to create clap along and cymbal movements, but their main function is to unlock moves and gestures for each song. Striking the rock out poses is perhaps more fun than the singing. They're the big appeal and in the dark, flashing and glowing, they're pretty ace, actually.

Unfortunately, that's about the only thing that's really exceptional about the game.

It might be foolish to imagine gamers sitting on a couch, singing pop songs in an attempt to become world class singers but, well, playing alone should be fun. You should want to practice or even just have a knees-up jam, but the single player mode doesn't have any penalties, training modes or reasons to make you feel less sad, singing to a computer in an empty room.

The song list is pretty horrible. While creating a list like this, which has to appeal to a very broad demographic, obviously it's got to get a lot of stuff that, well, bites onto the disc. That's alright but the thing is, there are not that many tracks to pick from and a lot of them are kind of pointless or just recent one-hit wonders no one will give a toss about in a year. It's sort of amusing that Cold Chisel got Khe Sahn on there and there's a Men At Work track (inexplicably not Land Down Under)… but other than that, nothing really stands out as stuff you'd enjoy at a karaoke lounge. Maybe the Ramones, Blondie or Mr. Johnny Cash but that's it, really. There's a distinct lack of that kind of anthem or club hit classic. On top of that, while video clips are included, they just don't make the cut on HD and all seem a little blurry. Cracking open the game and being vaguely dispirited by the track list is a poor feeling. Yes, downloadable content is promised, but you can't just grab the thing and invite mates over.

Similarly, a disappointing move is the capacity to download your own music from the external devices, like your iPod, PC, or even your own existing 360 playlist. Now, that sounds like a great idea - that sounds like you could set up the ultimate party playlist, but wonderful IP issues mean that you can't download lyrics. You can try it and it's mildly amusing, but without the lyrics, scoring is a bit all over the shop. It's not really much of a feature to be honest.

The final big failure of Lips is that, well, there's just so many cool features for a karaoke game we've seen on games for the PS2 that aren't here. It amazes me that you can't use the Xbox camera to record your songs and upload them to Xbox Live. Classic YouTube fodder, denied to the world. Nor can you share sing-alongs with other users. It's shake-your-head territory, really.

It's not all failures and suck, though. There's three kinds of visualisations for the songs, the CG one is particularly charming and even funny. The Kiss mode is heaps of fun, where you have to co-operate with a player to make two figures get into a lip lock on the screen. Seems to me that's tailor-made for party flirting right there. The Vocal Fighter mode is easily the most fun, where two players battle each other literally off the stage. It's a damn shame that there aren't more strutting attitude songs to support this. Or any hip-hop aside from Bust a Move by Young MC, which isn't exactly Cube, you know? Time Bomb is perhaps the most creative mode, where you must cooperate to defuse a ticking fuse. All of these things are a little undercut by the simplicity of the game.

Is it a good game? Well, yes it is. On its own merits it's quite a lot of fun – but do flashing microphones tempt you away from the online virtues of SingStar? Well, that's hard to say. Lips really could have bought way more to the table than what it did. It is sadly lacking in online options and just doesn't really feel like it benefits from Live content at all. You can't even save and playback tracks. If you're looking to get your party game on, well, you could start here... but only if you've got nothing else.