We Sing Rock… er… Rocks

Karaoke games always give me mixed feelings. I like singing. I just don’t like hearing my real voice, every flat note and missed cue amplified a thousand times and echoing around the room. Hence, I love going to Lucky Voice, a series of karaoke bars around the UK who will sell you copious amounts of alcohol and thoughtfully provide tambourines and conga drums to drown out your wavering tones.

I was invited down to the Lucky Voice in Soho the other week to check out We Sing Rock! For me, this addition to the We Sing series has one of the greatest track lists of any karaoke game to date. Yes, including Rock Band. See, the thing about Rock Band and Guitar Hero and all those other rock games – yes they have fantastic rock tunes but they have to make sure that everyone in the band has an interesting part to play. Great songs such as Sheryl Crow’s All I Wanna Do make an appearance but “in the field” they generally get shouted down in favour of songs with great guitar solos.

We Sing Rock! happily features songs light on the guitar, like Meredith Brooks’ Bitch and Tina Turner’s The Best and it’s chock-full of them. With tracks spanning five decades of rock and a great blend of male and female singers, We Sing Rock! is perfect for parties where you don’t want to deal with those bad-taste friends who always want to sing bloody James bloody Blunt and his stupid Beautiful song. God, I hate that song. Piss off over We Sing UK Hits if you want that crap, along with Coldplay, Spice Girls and Sugababes.

Actually, there is a Coldplay track on this game – Violet Hill. It doesn’t even have any singing for the first 35 seconds, what the hell? I’ll conveniently overlook its inclusion for now and perhaps bar anyone who wants to sing it from my apartment.

Basically… with We Sing Rock!, Nordic Games have taken their winning karaoke game formula and finally produced a game with a tracklist that is 97% awesome (plus Coldplay). All the typical game modes are in there so you can play cooperatively or competitively with your friends. There’s also the rather fearsome Expert mode which shows you the music video and visualises your own performance but doesn’t actually show you the target notes you’re trying to hit.

Watch this launch trailer to see what I mean – Expert mode starts at 0:41.

We Sing Rock! is out this Friday, 11th November. If I could stand to hear the sound of my own voice, I’d absolutely buy it*

*This is a lie. I’m going to get Skyrim. But you should totally get this karaoke game unless you really like dragons.