If any game is guilty of corrupting the innocent and perverting the moral health of the nation, it's this sort of thing.
A no-mark SingStar rip-off that takes everything brilliant about Sony's karaoke game, rolls it in filth and then tries to hide the mess by covering it in X Factor branding, this exists for exactly one reason: to dupe the desperate and the easily led into buying it for some other unfortunate as a Christmas present. If you're one of the sorry few who winds up unwrapping this, make sure you savour every tear of the paper, because once you get the disc in the machine and the flakey little mics in the USB ports, the fun will be utterly, utterly dead.
Most unforgivably, the X Factor game lacks pretty much anything that's identifiably X Factor. Beyond the logo, a couple of musical stings and a lumpen effort to imitate the show's auditions-rehearsals-finals structure, nothing about this resembles the programme.
The makers couldn't secure so much as a Kate Thornton cameo or a Sharon Osbourne lookalike. Instead, your singing progress is judged by a panel of genero-judges. There's guy with dark hair, grey haired guy, sweepy fringe brunette with the flapping arms, and sweepy fringe brunette with a paralysed neck. It's a bit like having a fever dream about being a contestant, especially when you notice that the faceless, 2D audience members are all clapping for you in synch.
And what do these judges have to say to you? In The X Factor TV show, cruelty is king: it's a platform that eats the emotionally unstable and spits them out with sneer. But that's all gone for the game. Instead, the grotesque marionettes assessing you say things like "That was great!", or "You've improved so much!", or "I wasn't convinced at the start… but I am now!"
And they say these things again and again and again, regardless of the actual performance. The software isn't any more rigorous. You can wobble off the notes for a good half line, and the game will still spring for a "Perfect!" at the end. The song selection is miserably narrow, the backing tracks are depressing session versions (the sort of thing you'll hear while choosing BOGOF shampoo in the supermarket) and the default song length is shorter than the post-Factor career of the average winner.
Breaking up the rounds are useless quickfire "trivia" questions on things such as how many times you've practised so far, and eye-gougingly senseless trips to "Boot Camp" – a dressing room setting that acts as a hub where you can check stats, review fan mail and try on the new outfits you get every time you croak through a song. The X Factor is desperate for you to like it, so it showers you with tat: I got three trophies before I finished the first song, and later on I earned one called "Brilliant", apparently for skipping a cut-scene. Good, then, for giving you an unearned ego boost; bad in every other way imaginable.
• Game reviewed on PS3
