Game Review: OpenMic

OpenMic is a karaoke SingStar-like game for WP7 where you sing to popular songs and are graded on your singing talents. Watch the Video Review to hear ME sing to Ke$ha and other songs way out of my vocal range!

Overall Score: 3/5

While OpenMic’s ability to recognize your pitch while canceling out the background music being played by the phone’s speaker is pretty impressive, the game’s song selections really disappoints.

Gameplay: 3/5

In OpenMic, you get to pick from three songs: Your Love is My Drug by Ke$ha, Battlefield by Jordin Sparks, and Kelly Clarkson’s My Life Would Suck Without You. As you can notice, all three songs are sung by female artists, so that instantly excludes almost half of the population from playing OpenMic (I’m sure some guys can sing in those octaves, but many can’t!). When you pick a song, you then choose between four difficulty levels (which actually have a great impact on how accurate you have to sing) and you can turn the vocals of the song on or off (that means if you turn that off, the songs will only include the background music, and the vocals will be all on you, true karaoke style). The accuracy of the pitch detector for your singing is pretty good for a little phone game. It somehow can actually do a decent job of separating your voice from the background music that is being played from your phone’s speaker. This is of course nowhere near as accurate as SingStar for the PS3, but if you can’t stop singing while you’re out and about, OpenMic may work for you.

Presentation: 5/5

The game looks extremely polished. All of the menus and graphics are crisp, clear, and professional. The music is of course the original songs, so they sound like they should. When you first select a song in the menu, it’ll play a quick preview of the song just like Rock Band will, which is a nice touch.

Lasting Value: 2/5

While singing Kelly Clarkson and Ke$ha songs are tons of fun, singing the same three songs over and over again can get really boring. It would be great if the developers update OpenMic to include more songs, but for now the only replayability comes from singing the songs over again for a higher score, or playing on a tougher difficulty. The lack of songs really hurts the lasting value.

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Title: OpenMic
Price: $2.99
Publisher: Rain