We Sing UK Hits

La la la la laaaaaaaaaa! Warm up your vocal chords. There’s a new karaoke game for the Wii and it’s a total blast.

Games like this are always best played with friends, so be sure to grab at least one fellow warbler. We Sing UK Hits is the latest in the line of popular We Sing games for the Wii. While its sister title We Dance was entertaining enough, We Sing is definitely the popular, gorgeous one. It has instant playability and likeability. It also has lots of friends: We Sing, We Sing Encore, We Sing Robbie Williams (…) and more to come with We Sing Rock! (exclamation mark entirely deliberate and necessary) out at the end of this month.

We Sing follows much in the vein of other karaoke games like Singstar and Lips, meaning that there’s a video of a track playing in the background while the lyrics pop up along the bottom and pitch lines light up along the screen as you sing along. Use the pitch lines to sing the song correctly; the better your accuracy, the better your score. You can also use the game as actual karaoke, removing the vocal tracks and the pitch lines, giving you just the lyrics and your own lovely or cringeworthy voice. The karaoke game is a tried and trusted formula designed to appeal directly to the casual/party gamer. We Sing is available with two microphones for £49.99 or just the game on its own for £29.99. The microphones are USB Logitech ones, so any USB mics will work and you can play with up to four players at once… if you have that many mics!

The theme of We Sing UK Hits is, well, UK Hits. British artists appear on this game, from the more recent like Jessie J and Tinie Tempah to the not-so-recent like The Animals and even Bucks Fizz. As you can probably tell from the artists just mentioned, the range is quite diverse going from cheesy to pop to rock and right the way back around again. It’s an impressive song list and most of the songs have official videos. Oh, and of course you get RickRoll’d. This game is instant win for having Florence & The Machine’s ‘You’ve Got the Love’ on it – mine and Fran’s favourite karaoke place has had this song broken every time we’ve gone there. Rage. There are forty songs on the disc to keep you singing along, but no store mode to buy any more. We’ve been spoiled by Lips, etc. here but let’s move on; you have plenty to keep you occupied!

To keep it interesting, there are various modes in the game and those familiar with the We Sing series will see nothing new. The best by far are the party modes. There are quite a few party modes to present new twists to your bog standard vocal battles. ‘Blind’ makes lyrics randomly disappear, ‘Expert’ gives you no lyrics and no pitch bar to help you, ‘Marathon’ challenges you to score the highest in a long-running playlist and ‘First to X’ challenges you to reach the points threshold before your rivals. There are of course the standard versus and group battle modes which we’ve come to expect from any game of this kind.

Interestingly, playing this game on your own gives you a something a little different. You can run through ‘singing lessons’ which help you with pitch through a series of mini exercises, encouraging you to sing a series of notes correctly in order to pass. In-between each exercise there are little vocal tips about correct posture and breathing. Not what you’re going to get from proper vocal training of course, but it’s still a good thing to include plus the last lesson is a beast to complete.

You get awards and different difficulties to keep you going through the game although it would be nice if some of the party modes were available as single player versions to stop things getting a little stale. Overall, the game is very nicely polished with an unobtrusive but attractive title image dominating the title screen and options allowing you to change your colour scheme. The whole look is relatively fuss-free but it works well with this game, with the easy navigation encouraging you to just jump straight in and get to the heart of it all: belting your lungs out.