A decent karaoke simulation that starts to touch on what it would be like to compete in the American Idol contest.
It won't take long to explain the gameplay. Basically, you select a song from a fairly impressive list of 40 popular tunes (with many more available to download on the systems that allow it) and sing as well as you can. The game measures how close the pitch is of your voice to how the song goes. It doesn't recognize words, so theoretically you could hum your way through songs you don't know. If a song starts to get out of your vocal range, you can drop down or go up an octave and the game would never know the difference. Based on your performance, you are given a score from zero (although you could burp into the microphone and get a better score than that) to 100,000. There are also four difficulties so that anyone from the tone deaf to professional singers can be challenged. If you know the song well, it is quite possible to get the top score, so this is one of the few games that can possibly be perfected by casual gamers. The basics work well enough and the game will keep bringing you back to try and get a better score on your favorite songs the same way Rock Band and Guitar Hero do. You can also sing duets with a friend and some of the songs included contain true duet versions. Don't be fooled by the manual through; it implies that you can use your headset as the second mic, but it means a USB headset and not the one everyone uses for Xbox live.
While the core gameplay is fine, the bells and whistles are a bit lacking. This become apparent when you actually start the competition. Your first decision is to select a persona. There is no character creator, so you have to pick one of the premade people. You can edit their clothing and hairstyles, but you are stuck with their face. Even if you manage to make someone that looks like you, the graphic that portrays your player in the menus stays the same as the premade character before editing. Also, the main reward in the game is unlocking more characters, which seems dumb because I don't know anyone that wouldn't want to just play as someone that looks like themselves. They aren't real contestants from the show, either. Just generic stereotypes of what the developers thought the contestants from the show would look like. Once the competition starts, you do really feel like you are competing in American Idol. The performance locations are pulled right from the show; everything from the first audition room to the final concert stage. I have to say that there was a bit of a knot in my stomach every time the judges started to critique my performance since they are voiced by and look like their real world counterparts. They have a vast library of comments and it always seems like genuinely accurate feedback, although I personally felt that Simon was too nice. I actually was looking forward to him ripping me a new one but it never really happened. Unfortunately, after the performances, you are put on a static menu that shows who got eliminated. It would have been nice to actually have the option to watch the elimination ceremony or see bits from your competition's performances. You don't ever even see the other performers other than a small headshot of them next to their name. The announcer here is just a generic voice over guy since Ryan Seacrest was busy with….wait, does anyone know what he actually does?
There are a few other cut corners that hurt the game. Randy has a tendency to assume everyone is a guy during his feedback, which is odd since the other judges make comments that aren't gender specific. There is an 'unlockables' menu that we fully completed in our first night even though we are far from mastering the game. If it weren't for the achievements left to get (we played on Xbox 360), there would have been no other real goals for us to shoot for. There are a couple of videos to unlock, but even these are a little disappointing. There are four videos of the show's judges talking about how great the game is, which seemed pointless since I already bought it so it didn't need a sales pitch. The others are a handful of performance videos from the real show but these don't even show the whole song. On a side note, the version chosen for the game of the widely known song, "Over the Rainbow," is a terrible choice. The performer in the recording did their own thing with the song and everyone is going to want to sing it the traditional way, which will lead to poor scores for singing it the 'right' way. I was even informed by my girlfriend, who is a professionally trained singer, that the game's version is less impressive and much easier than version everyone knows from "The Wizard of Oz."
Graphically, it's passable. The stages and lighting effects are right from the show. The camera angles really make you feel like you are watching an episode, although you will only really see them if you are singing a song you know by heart. The character models won't win any awards, but they look good. It would have been nice to see the judges wearing more than one outfit. All in all, the graphics are just enough.
The game does do a good job of being a great karaoke simulation as well as portraying the tension of the show to a extent. Had more time been put into the rest of the game, it would have had a real shot at competing with the other big music games on the market. I was impressed that it is still a regularly priced game ($49.99 on the Xbox 360 and PS3, though oddly $59.99 on the Wii whose games are typically cheaper) even though it includes the microphone. Even with it's faults, it keeps me wanting to play, which is really all that is important.