The Voice: I Want You

Genre: Music-Rhythm

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local), 2 Competitive (Local Alternating)

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Review:

The Voice is a Karaoke game released on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii, and Wii U in 2014 that has players singing along with 30 popular songs ranging from the 1980s all the way to the then-current day. This game sold with an included microphone that is required to play.

Right from the start, I need to address the huge glaring issue in that opening paragraph: yes, this game only contains 30 songs. For a Karaoke game, that’s just absurd. Here are the songs included in this game:

Ain’t No Mountain High Enough by Marvin Gaye

Alone by Heart

Apologize by Timbaland

Black Horse & The Cherry Tree by KT Tunstall

Brave by Sara Barielles

Bubbly by Colbie Calliat

Chillin’ It by Cole Swindwell

Counting Stars by OneRepublic

Cruisin’ by Smokey Robinson

Drive by Incubus

Fallin’ by Alicia Keys

Girls Just Want to Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper

Hey, Soul Sister by Train

Hit Me With Your Best Shot by Pat Benatar

I’m Like A Bird by Nelly Furtado

Lady Marmalade by Patti LaBelle

Lips Of An Angel by Hinder

Look After You by The Fray

Material Girl by Madonna

My Girl by The Temptations

My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark by Fall Out Boy

No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems by Kenny Chesney

Outta My Head by Craig Campbell

Over You by Miranda Lambert

Pocketful Of Sunshine by Natasha Bedingfield

September by Earth, Wind & Fire

Stay by Rihanna

The Fox (What Does The Fox Say?) by Ylvis

You Gonna Fly by Keith Urban

You Won’t Find This by Carrie Underwood

There are some good songs in there, but it’s still a pretty pathetic list overall, and it’s made worse by the fact that all of these songs are only covers, and bad covers at that, with vocalists that often sound nothing like the original artists.

The rest of the presentation here is pretty terrible too, with songs that just show a monochrome video footage of some random person singing the song in question, backed by a plain-looking background. This just looks so ugly and generic, yet embarrassing at the same time. As I understand it, other versions of this game supposedly got backed by the music videos from the original songs, and I wonder just why the heck that isn’t the case here, because it would have been worlds better than what we got.

Beyond this, you have fairly standard pitch-sensing gameplay, fairly standard 2-player duet and competitive play, and a campaign where the game limits your song choices at each step in the campaign… you know, more than the already-limited song catalog.

I know that fans of Music-Rhythm games on the Wii U don’t exactly have a wealth of options, but even so, The Voice has to be the worst one you could possibly choose. A tiny track list full of bad covers, backed by ugly cheap-looking video… do yourself a favor and get any other Music-Rhythm game and you’ll get more bang for your buck than this terrible game.

tl;dr – The Voice is a Karaoke game featuring bad covers of only 30 songs backed by embarrassingly bad cheap-looking monochrome video footage of random people singing. This is about as bad as Karaoke games get, do not buy it.

Grade: D

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