System: X360, PS3
Dev: EA Chicago
Pub: Electronic Arts
Release: March 6, 2007
Players: 1-2
ESRB Rating: Mature
Review by D'Marcus Beatty

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Review Rating Legend
1.0 - 1.9 = Avoid
2.0 - 2.4 = Poor
2.5 - 2.9 = Average
3.0 - 3.4 = Fair
3.5 - 3.9 = Good
4.0 - 4.4 = Great
4.5 - 4.9 = Must Buy
5.0 = The Best

The soundtrack to Def Jam is expected to shine, and for fans of rap music, it does just that. With over twenty-six popular music tracks, most from the game's rap stars, Def Jam has a thumping soundtrack, although everyone should be warned that the tracks are uncensored and have lyrics in all of their original four-lettered glory. Sound effects are great too, and the featured rappers and guest stars all do a surprisingly good job in their voice acting as well.

In addition to Build-A-Label, there are a few other game modes. Throw Down is a simple Vs. mode that allows you to fight with any unlocked and available characters. Beatings with Bass disables the ability to manipulate the tracks so that the fighters just have to anticipate the environmental hazards. My Soundtracks allows you to fight opponents using songs that you've uploaded to your Xbox 360. The game simply detects the bass line and adjusts the environmental hazards accordingly. There is a practice mode where you can practice your moves, and finally you can get on Xbox Live and challenge others with your created character.

Overall, Def Jam Icon is fun, but it doesn't live up to its pedigree or to expectations. By altering the focus of the game from the fighting to the music, Icon feels unfinished. If this game still had the previous (or an even deeper) fighting system, a run button, and weapons, it would probably already be a classic. While the visuals are amazing, the game just doesn't deliver as well in the fighting as it should.

By D'Marcus Beatty
CCC Co-Site Director

Features:

The guys at EA Chicago are taking the power of music to a whole new level by Patrick Evans

Some of the producers and developers over at EA Chicago believe that previous Def Jam titles like Fight for New York were, well, a little beyond reality. “You don’t find rappers fighting against one another in seedy underground bars,” Michael Mendheim, producer on the upcoming Def Jam: Icon, stated during the recent EA Chicago opening. In his eyes, and in the eyes of the entire EA Chicago team, they are bringing the focus of the Def Jam franchise back to where it belongs; the music that makes the Def Jam label so special.

Instead of spending time underground and going after other rappers inside a wrestling ring, players will be in charge of running their own record label. Mendheim described the single-player story mode as a “Create-a-Label” mode, where decisions that you make and how you handle your stable of talent dictate how well your label earns. The fighting that we saw in the demo would be the result of a dispute between rival labels. If a rival label is moving in on one of your prospects and trying to sign them behind your back, you can challenge them to a fight to settle things. “Spats between labels occur all the time,” Mendheim mentioned. EA Chicago is simply moving these spats along to the point of a street fight, which involves many fewer lawyers than a lawsuit for breach of contract.

When you first set eyes on the upcoming Icon, even in it’s Pre-Alpha state, you are instantly impressed by both the stark realism they are striving for in their fighter models, as well as the genius artistic vision in the background. As rappers T.I. and Ludacris circle one another at some non-descript gas station in a major downtown area, the entire combat arena is alive with the music in the background. Debris on the ground rattles and bounces while utility poles and wiring shake to the beat of “Stand Up.” Even the background city moves, shakes, and shuffles during the song, going from a solid skyline to a jostled, earth-quake ridden splintered image looks almost post-apocalyptic. Hazards such as broken gas pumps spout fire plumes ten feet in the air in rhythm with the song; the music that accompanies the song directly affects the game while you are playing it.

Def Jam: Icon is being built from the ground up and completely redone in terms of combat, storyline, and focus. The old AKI WCW vs. NWO wrestling engine that was used in Fight for New York is history, replaced with a more intuitive and timing-based combat engine that rewards players for using their environments as weapons. Regular slow- and quick-punches are mapped to the face buttons on the right side of the controller, which can be used to combo opponents and open them up to stronger attacks (more on those later). Blocking such attacks is as simple as pulling the left trigger and anticipating whether your opponent is going high or low and pushing the corresponding buttons. Simplicity in the stand-up street fighting opens up many other possibilities. When one player can learn the timing of another and anticipate their next punch/kick, he can then reverse that strike and grapple him. After you have a player in your clutches, you can either punch him in the face a couple times or toss him into a nearby wall, gas pump, or car wash.

But there is so much more to the action than simple punches and grabs. “We wanted the stage you fight in to become another character,” says EA Chicago General Manager and Def Jam: Icon Executive Producer Kudo Tsunoda. “Everything in the stage is dynamic and changing throughout the fight.” The stages themselves will house any number of obstacles and hazards. In the demonstration level, there were many different places to toss your adversary for huge damage. The car wash, which has a rolling squeegee that pops out in rhythm with the song playing in the background, does outrageous damage to any unfortunate player that gets caught in its path. Our favorite were the gas pumps once they had been broken. Players that are too close to it when it goes off will be sent flying skyward and lose tons of health.

The analog sticks are essential to the new directional combat that EA is developing. Players can use the analog to kick or punch their opponents in specific directions to set them up for the hazards. Simply pushing the stick in the enemies direction will result in a straight-leg kick, but many other moves are possible as well. Pushing down and then rotating the analog towards the opponent results in a spin-kick, while pushing towards and then rotating up gives you a spinning back-handed fist-strike. Grabbing an opponent is as simple as pushing that same analog up, and throwing him in any direction is as easy as pushing that same direction once you have a hold of him. The fighting controls became easier and easier during our 20 minute playtest; we were punching, round-housing, and tossing each other into the sides of parked cars and fire-plumes as if we had been playing the game for months.

The two different builds that were on display for both the PS3 and Xbox 360 were impressive and showed tons of promise for a title this early in development. Rappers T.I. and Big Boi were rendered with striking accuracy and their faces animated to accurately convey their emotions and grimaces during a fight. This was best seen when players got up close and started punching away at one another. The status of your fighter will be portrayed through visual cues throughout a fight as there will be no traditional HUD to speak of. If your fighter is keeling over and that gas tank is about to burst into flames, you can pretty much assume that your fight is over. Enough cannot be said about the cloth physics involved with the rappers outfits. Rapper T.I. wore three layers of clothes that looked as if they were all moving independently. As he bounced up and down, the clothes followed behind as you would expect a real-life hoodie and vest. On-screen action was a bit on the slow side, and the graphics had quite a bit of clipping problems to deal with, but with plenty of time to pull those things together, one should would think this game will look phenomenal..

In addition to the gas station that was displayed at EA Chicago, there will be approximately 10 different levels available in the final version. One stage that Mendheim eluded too during our time with him was an L.A. rooftop at night that featured bouncing lights in the background that would react to the music much like the landscape does at the gas station. The producers wouldn’t go into anything more with us, but they assured us that all of the locations would make obvious sense in the context of the game and would all have their own unique features and hazards for players to contend with.

Many of the specifics such as what kind of different fighting modes, both off and online, are still unknown. In such an early stage, the developers are undoubtedly afraid of promising anything at this time aside from everything listed above. There will be around 25 or so different rappers featured, accompanied by a soundtrack of “about 30 tracks.” As music is a key focal point of the game, choosing your tracks carefully will be key. Not only will the beats and patterns of the hazards be different from track to track but rappers that fight during one of their own songs will receive boosts to their overall fighting ability. The coolest feature that Kudo Tsunoda promises is the ability to upload your own songs from an Ipod or any other MP3 player and use them during a fight. No matter what song you use, the game’s software will recognize the heavy beats and pattern the different stages accordingly. “With this feature, you can finally settle the argument about which music style is better. You can pit our hip-hop against your Swedish heavy metal,” Tsunoda affirmed after I asked about the possibility of a Soilwork song playing in Icon.

Def Jam: Icon, at this early stage in development, looks promising as a next-generation fighting experience. Instead of only striving for photo-realism, EA Chicago is taking the hardware of the future beyond by also infusing urban artistic style into the background. Its control scheme focuses on reverses and grabs as a means to use the environment for damage, whereas many fighters to this point focuses on direct damage between the two combatants. This new scheme paired with an environment that by its definition is completely dynamic and fluid makes for what promises to be a truly one-of-a-kind fighting experience when it hits the PS3 and Xbox 360 in March.

By Patrick Evans
CCC Former Staff Writer