Pete Burns, Chris Martin and Freddie Mercury make their Switch debut!
It’s an inevitability that any console released in the last fifteen years or so will get a karaoke title in its library sooner or later.
If you’re planning on picking this up, you’re going to be in for a hard time getting hold of it. Yes, the Switch physical game collectors’ worst nightmare has struck with this title; not only are there three versions of the game (the solus game and copies with one and two microphones included respectively), the game – well, the UK version, at least, is terribly difficult to find. At the time of writing, the only Amazon listing had it at a whopping £969! Of course, we can’t put too much blame on the developers for this, but they could have helped with a larger print run.
To the game itself, and what you can’t take away from Let’s Sing 2018 is that it is a lot of fun to play. The karaoke fun is spread across a number of modes, with the classic mode being the place to start. Here you’re simply playing through each of the songs in an order of your choosing, and your mission is to nail the pitch when singing rather than worrying too much about getting the words right. It shouldn’t be too hard, as you get all the words and the pitch changes on the screen as you would in any musical title, but of course, knowing the songs in the first place helps. Nail the notes to score the points, and unlock rank points and perks.
A hilarious touch that’s been included is that all of your voice is recorded and echoed back to you straight away, making it pretty off-putting when you’re too busy cackling with laughter at the vocally dreadful performance that you’re turning in.
Other modes up the ante a bit. TV mode hides some of the words, requiring you to sing them correctly to win, while Feat. mode has you paired with a friend to take set verses each, ‘discovering your compatibility’. Mix Tape mode, meanwhile, delivers seven quickfire excerpts from songs which you’ll score points for nailing. All the modes are different enough to make the game feel more than just a generic karaoke machine. You can even sit back and just watch the music videos, which are all present and correct, turning your Switch almost into an MTV machine.
One of my biggest dreads with playing games of this genre is being completely put off by the tone-deaf, unlistenable modern chart ‘hits’ which usually call them home. However, this particular example has struck a pretty impressive blend of the karaoke classics – The Proclaimers’ I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles), Queen’s We Are The Champions and John Lennon’s Imagine are all here and are as timeless as they ever were. But the modern hits are well-known and well-chosen. Lady Gaga’s Million Reasons is perfect, while the likes of Echosmith’s Cool Kids and Clean Bandit’s Rockabye offer a good range of other tracks. There’s a large handful of extra songs as purchasable DLC, though, which is a bit naughty given this is an expensive package in the first place.
As the Switch’s only karaoke offering so far, Let’s Sing 2018 has a clear run in the market. It would be interesting to see how a follow-up with a wider range of songs and more of a print run would fare.
Let's Sing 2018
Summary
Let’s Sing 2018 is a fun karaoke experience and has a decent range of songs to keep most palettes engaged. Given that the game is costly, I do hope that there will be a price cut on the DLC extra songs, though.