Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore Review

Karaoke Revolution Presents
American Idol
Encore

As I said in an earlier post, I love singing! I had only tried singing in a game in Rock Band so far, but when I saw a commercial for this game I knew I had to try it out! I kept wishing that I could try some more vocally challenging songs, because there weren't many on Rock Band.
I went out and got the game as soon as it was available in my city's EB games. It came with a microphone, which I didn't really need because I had the Rock Band one, and I like the Rock Band one a lot because it's pretty substantial. The KRAmerican Idol one felt pretty cheap in comparison, but I guess it is good to have an extra for playing multi player.
This game did have a few more challenging songs, which was nice. I knew almost all of the songs as well, so that was a bonus. I would have liked to see some more "hard rock" songs, because I tend to prefer them over the more "popish" ones, but there was only one on the set list. I guess it can be hard to find "hard rock" songs with a lot of singing in them, but I know they're out there!
The character customization was pretty lame, especially since it was one of the aspects of the game that was advertised on the commercial I watched. Basically there are a few different characters you can choose from, then you can change their name, hair, and clothes. There is a fair bit of different outfits and such to choose from, but I was still disappointed. Compared to Rock Band's character customization, it was disappointing.
Singing is basically the same for KRAmerican Idol as it was for Rock Band. You have to sing in the right pitch to score points, but can sing in any octive. There are even crowd bonus phrases, like Rock Band's overdrive. If you've played the singing career in Rock Band, then you can basically just sit down with KRAmerican Idol and play through it without any tutorial, at least I did. The only difficult thing was navigating to the actual main game play. Maybe it was just me, but it took me forever to find the right mode to play in to unlock things and get my achievements.
The judges comments were cool for the first 18 songs I sang, then they just started repeating themselves so I started skipping past them. I am sure they would say different things if you finished the songs at different ratings, but I never finished a song below "good" to hear them. I guess the game could have been a bit more challenging. . .
The achievements are sort of fun. There is one to get three excellent comments from Simon, which you'd think would be difficult, but it can be completed on any difficulty, so basically you could get it just humming slightly on key on the easy mode, lol. There is one to get the "diamond" rating on a bunch of songs, one to get the "platinum" rating, and a "gold" rating one. The only challenging part of getting these for me is trying to get the "platinum" and "gold" ones, because when you get "diamond", it doesn't count for the other two. So, I have to purposefully mess up on the songs to try and get a lower rating so I can get the achievement, lol.
I think overall, if you enjoyed the singing aspect of Rock Band and just want to try out a variety of new songs, or if you just like singing pop music with your friends, then this game is for you. If you were trying to decide between it and Rock Band however, I'd say Rock Band wins, hands down! They both have downloadable songs, but I believe Rock Band has 58 initial songs and KRAmerican Idol only has 40, and for just the game disk, they are around the same price. Rock Band has a better variety of song types too, and even if you aren't interested in the guitar or drums, I found the the solo singing career of Rock Band was still more fun than KRAmerican Idol.