Its a fun party game if you have the guts to sing, but it seems too easy for better singers.

User Rating: 7 | Karaoke Stage PS2
Karaoke Revolution is a game where players sing along to various songs to earn respect and please the crowd. As the lyrics scroll across the bottom of the screen, they are accompanied by pitch meters. These meters measure the tone of your voice to see if you are on key or not. If you do well, the crowd cheers, and your meter stays at green. If the crowd doesn't like you, they boo, and your meter falls into the red. It is kind of hard to fail a song, but if you continue to sing horribly the song will end.

For people who like to sing, this game will be fun for a few hours. There are some great tracks included, although a lot of them are generic karaoke songs that you'd expect to see in the game. It would have been nice to have some more variety in the songs. Once you beat the game, there is virtually nothing to do but sing, sing, sing. It gets boring after a few hours. An experienced singer will complete this game easily, even on the most challenging difficulty. This is why it feels more like a party game than anything else.

There were a few things that annoyed me about Karaoke Revolution. First of all, you don't even have to sing at all. If you simply hum the song or try to match the pitches, you can hit all of the notes as if you were a pro. Second of all, I didn't like how they limited talented people. The pitches aren't always as complex as they sound, and there is really no freestylin' it allowed. You have to sing on key, and follow the guide lines without straying too far from the original song. Lastly, I hated the fact that I could sing better than half of the cover singers in the game. I wish they would have either included the real singers, or hired more experienced covers.

The graphics are what you might expect from a karaoke game. There are plenty of strobe lights and effects to watch. The character models look good, but their heads are unrealistically large. The crowd isn't very diverse, since it is made up of 2-3 characters duplicated about ten times. The one good thing about the singer is that he does move his mouth, although he may sound ridiculous when he sings girl songs.

One thing this game suffers greatly from is replay value. Once a player completes the game, he or she will have no reason to come back to it. They do have a normal karaoke mode where you aren't penalized for bad singing, but even that gets boring after a few times. The funny thing is that there is a menu for expansion disks. When you go into it, it says "Please insert a Karaoke Revolution Expansion Disk." Its too bad that they never decided to make expansions, so this menu is pretty much obselete.

Overall, Karaoke Revolution is a good game for people who like to sing, but even the most hardcore karaoke fans will have a hunger for more variety. Songs like "Hit Me With Your Best Shot," and "Celebration" are songs that you might expect to appear in this game, but you will get tired of singing after a while. This game could have been much better if the developers included missions, a more intricate multiplayer mode, and more songs. Without that, it just feels like a flashy karaoke machine.