When making Def Jam Icon it’s almost as if the developers had a checklist of rap stereotypes and ticked each one off. Aggression – check! Gun violence – Check! Crooked cops – Check! Scantily clad women who are gold diggers – Check! Gratuitous use of the N-Word – Check! Bling up to the eyeballs – Check! Mention of Tupac and Biggy – Check and Check! References to hiphop being more than all this – Check!

Usually when this is presented in a game, the check box for “really bad game” needs to be marked too, but in the case of Def Jam Icon, that surprisingly remains unticked. Ignoring all that rap stereotyped rubbish, what we have here is a solid fighting game that, whilst light on options is still a lot of fun, especially against someone else.

The first thing you notice though is the game menus are a little fiddly and annoying. They don’t seem logical – there is a game mode option, but it ignores one of the options, which is found under its own menu. But once you find your way around you have the options to do the career mode of Build a Label, or you can jump straight into the fighting through Throw Down and Beating with Bass. Throw Down is the main mode of fighting and it’s good to jump into this before attempting the career mode to get a handle on how to play.

Fighting actions are controlled by the face buttons. There’s a quick strike and strong strike, both high and low. Special moves are mapped to the right joystick, with moves reminiscent of Fight Night. For example, move the joystick to the left and then rotate to the right to perform a jump kick for one character, but the same move might be a back handed slap for another. Grabbing, possibly the most important move in the game, is also controlled by the right joystick. Blocking and countering is done by the right trigger, and taunts are made by pressing both bumpers. I was severely disappointed that Lil Jon didn’t scream out “WHAT? OKAY!” Dave Chapelle style with his taunts.

There are 6 different fighting styles with have pros and cons – for example Muay Fly allows quick song switching but it’s harder to break out of grabs, whilst Beatboxer can activate hazards with excellent scratch speeds, but has weak song shifting skills. “Wait, What?!” I hear you ask. “Scratching?” “Song Switching?” With just regular fighting moves, the game would still be pretty cool, but the fun comes from the interactive environments, which are a little different to usual fighting games. They pulse to the beat of the music, and on every heavy beat they strobe with force to lay some smackdown on you or your foe.

You do more damage when your song, chosen before each match, is playing. You change song by holding the left trigger and spinning the right joystick around until the character on screen switches hands, and then you rotate the left stick. This can be countered, so it’s best done when an opponent is laid out on the floor from a beat down or a throw. You can grab an opponent and throw them into a certain area, and if you time it to the beat of the song playing, the environments react and damage them. In the Club level for example, throw your opponent near the pole dancers and the girls will swing around and kick your enemy. Furthermore, if you time your throw with the beat and then DJ scratch (holding the left trigger whilst spinning the right joystick) you trigger the bigger beat to activate the environmental hazard and do more damage. In the club the speaker booms a massive sonic blast that sends your opponent flying across the screen.

I don’t think the “music as a weapon” premise is entirely apt though. You can still beat the game by using only fighting and countering moves. You don’t particularly have to switch songs to get the upper hand, or have any sense of rhythm to time throws and scratches. But the game makes it so you want to do these moves, because they look and feel cool. There’s a great sense of satisfaction in timing the scratch and sending you opponent flying or burst into flame.

The other modes are pretty much the same as Throw Down. Beating with Bass has no scratching disabling hazard triggering, so hits and throws have to be made more rhythmically. There’s also My Soundtrack mode, which allows you add your own tunes either streamed off a PC hard drive, or from a playlist on your Xbox360. This mode is great fun… Beating Sean Paul down to the sounds of REAL Jamaican reggae gave me a great sense of satisfaction, but nothing is better than beating Method Man to the sounds of the Spice Girls.

In Build a Label the objective is to sign up Def Jam artists and sell records to make money, and unravel a fairly trite story of intrigue. The way to sign artists is usually to beat the crap out of them, which is immensely satisfying. Once an artists signs, you’ve got to keep them happy by giving them money for parties and cars and lawyer fees and so on. All of this is done through the computer interface located in your “home”. You have emails that let you know who has the issue, what the issue is, and a simple Yes/No option to solve the issue.

You’ve also got girlfriends to attract and keep happy, and also the clothes and bling shops. The more money you amass, the more you can spend on Bling to get the girls and keep them happy. To get money, you have to budget for your artists’ records and releases. With releases, you determine how much is spent on promotion, radio play, and so on and the simple rule of thumb is the more you spend, the better you’ll do. Again, all this is done through the computer interface.

Once that’s taken care of, the game advances by allowing you to beat the crap out of anyone who bothers your artists, from pestering fans to talent poachers from rival record companies to corrupt cops, and so on. About ¾ the way through the career mode, you’re stripped of everything, and then have to fight the same 3 characters over and over. The last boss battle is a pain in the ass. The computer cheats by throwing you into the same environmental hazard every time, usually from distances impossible for the player to achieve. It is very, very frustrating, and apart from achievements doesn’t seem worth your while.

As a single player game, the game is let down by lack of options. Sure there are plenty of characters, and it’s great fun punching the crap out of bad rappers like Sean Paul, but with only three game modes, six fighting styles that are really quite similar, and 8 locations to fight in, it gets repetitive and dull particularly in career mode. The most fun with the game comes from playing with friends. Online or one on one in the lounge room, it is fun throwing each other about and triggering the environmental hazards. I’d actually go as far to say play this with a friend first then try the single player modes, just because the career mode especially may bore you too much and might make you put the game down and never pick up again.

Graphic wise the game is excellent. During fights, there’s no on screen meter for health, although there’s an option to turn it on. There’s a subtle tint to tell who’s in control – yellow when winning, or blue when your opponent is. This blooms out – shadows become deeper and shorter, light brighter – the more health lost, although when both you and your opponent are low on health it’s a bit hard to tell who is winning. The special effects are great, and the destruction you cause to the interactive environments feels natural, and seeing opponents fly across the screen as a result of you successfully scratching is immensely satisfying. As with most EA games, there’s a deep character editor with loads of options, and a heap of accessories to unlock so you can totally bling out your pimpin’ rapper.

Sound wise the punches and grunts and taunts of the characters are excellent, and the scratching sounds like you’re really doing it, but after a while the whole rap soundtrack feels stale. The N word and B word are so overused it becomes tiresome to hear them. Don’t we hear enough of that when playing on Xbox Live? All the artists who appear as characters have songs in the game, so if you like the Def Jam artists then you’ll obviously love the soundtrack, but the ability to play your own playlists is very, very welcome. In career mode, because you start with only one song and unlock more as you progress, you’ll hear the same tracks over and over. If I hear Mike Jones say “Mike Jones” one more time I’ll get medieval on his ass.

Conclusion:
For me, there’s too much ‘on paper’ that is wrong with this game – the music, the characters, the cliché’s, the lack of options and lack of variety. Yet, in practice and in spite of all this, I did enjoy Def Jam Icon. And a heap of my friends who also scoffed at it ‘on paper’ also enjoyed the game when we played against each other. The solid fighting with the unique music based environments lifts the game out of its rather weak premise and provides an enjoyable distraction. I can’t see myself playing it in a few months time, but I won’t be ashamed to say I enjoyed it either.

Pros:
Deep fighting system
Excellent graphics
Environmental effects brings something a little different to the fighting genre
Great fun against another person

Cons:
Illogical interface makes things harder than they should be
There are not too many options or variety in gameplay modes for single players
Career mode feels a little light and overly simple.
The boss battles in Career mode feel cheap and not a proper test of skill
The whole US Rap lifestyle clichés are perpetuated beyond annoyance