Review by: Brandon "Hit it" Cackowski-Schnell

Yoostar 2 can best be described as Rock Band for actors. Rather than pretending to be a rock star, performing songs on fake instruments, you pretend to be an actor, reading lines on a fake movie set. The problem with this comparison is that while Rock Band can be an incredibly fun party experience that can get the whole room involved, Yoostar 2 is a pretty sterile group activity, limited mostly by some very finicky technology and constraining design decisions.

Despite the technical flaws, there’s some interesting ideas at play here. Once you pick a scene to act in, your Kinect or Sony EyeToy camera takes a picture of the room and replaces it with the background of whatever scene you’re performing, complete with other actors. You’re then given an outline to fit your body into, and before you know it you’re telling Houston that you have a problem and that you need to recycle and restart, reading lines off of a karoake style bar of text. When the scene is done you’re graded on how well you stayed still, waited your turn to speak and delivered your line without running over. The usual star system tells you how well you did with cute phrases such as “Straight to DVD” or “Cult Classic” tied to the various star gradings.

Unfortunately for all of the interesting stuff promised by the technology, the results are wildly inconsistent, usually leaning towards the “not very” end of the spectrum. The software seems to be expecting walls that are entirely devoid of content as using the game in my very picture and toy intense basement caused the background image to vary from only half to three quarters complete. On top of this, whatever is in the background when the framing picture is taken, has to remain there for the entire scene or the background will get even more messed up. This means no moving curtains, no dogs or people walking behind you while you’re trying to get your Godfather on.

During the actual filming of the scenes, the voice recognition worked well for longer lines, but for shorter lines such as the “Hit it” at the end of the classic “it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses” scene from Blues Brothers, the game has a hard time determining that you said what you were supposed to. Nothing was more frustrating than having the game suggest I stick with the script when the script consisted of two words. These problems were with the PS3’s EyeToy camera and perhaps the Kinect version fares better, but it was consistently dodgy with the audio recognition for shorter scenes.

On a similar note, the game has a very hard time when there’s extraneous audio while you’re doing your scene, meaning that everyone else in the room has to be absolutely quiet while you’re acting. So the end result looks something like this: Before the scene starts, everyone who isn’t playing has to get entirely out of view of the camera. You then take a picture of the background, and very quickly get yourself within the actor outline. Once the scene starts, everyone not in the scene has to remain outside of the view of the camera as well as be perfectly quiet until the scene ends. Sound like a fun party to you?

You can play the game by yourself, but things break down even further in this mode. For one, you have a very short amount of time between when you take a picture of the background and when you have to get in the actor outline however you had to get yourself entirely out of the camera’s view for step one which means you have to chuck the controller and dash like mad. The game doesn’t tell you when a scene has two people in it, so if you picked one that’s expecting another person, there won’t be one and your score will get knocked for it. Finally, for scenes that have “objectionable content” they don’t give you a preview, and let you watch the scene beforehand, you just have to do it cold.