Let’s Sing 2025 Review (Xbox Series X)

STAFF REVIEW of Let’s Sing 2025 (Xbox Series X)

Wednesday, January 15, 2025.
by Brent Roberts

With many game genres receiving multiple entries, there's one genre that would easily fall into the neglected category are the karaoke games. These games are few and far between, and based off the way the game is structured and executed, can either be incredibly fun and exciting or an absolute waste of time and source of tremendous depression. Karaoke games have spawned across many platforms and usually try to pack a ton of content on the disc to keep you singing till your voice is but a memory. I ominously mention this upfront because I want you to keep this focus in your mind. Needless to say, these games are some of the biggest risks in gaming today because with music being so subjective, you may not get your value for money. Published by Plaion GmbH and developed by Voxler SAS, let's roll the dice and see what we get with Let's Sing 2025.

Starting out, I should point out that you do not need a microphone to use this game unlike other karaoke games. Instead, you can download the Let's Sing app and connect your phone to the game itself so you can use your smartphone as the microphone. If you wish to use a mic though you can connect one to the console and use it as you normally would. This innovation does lend itself to convenience and ease of setup. If I'm honest, the setup of the phone to the game wasn't the smoothest but the voice pickup was surprisingly accurate, and that is a good thing because this game is all about matching musical keys as much as possible, and you need an accurate mic to do that.

When you load up Let's Sing 2025 you'll have a limited option of choices to pick from. The new career mode allows you to select your avatar and begin the initial customization options. There isn't much to select from and you unlock more by doing better at performances. Once you have that configured and setup you're going to be meeting your initial "warm up" teachers Zoe and Chloe. These individuals are also just heads with hands and unique, but also cliche attitudes and expressions. They'll want you to show them what you're made of, so you get to pick a song to show them you're worth playing this game at least. For my starter song to get used to the game I picked the Disney tune Hakuna Ma tata (what?). Once you complete the tune you'll go through a sequence where the game introduces you to your main career path to Soundtown. This is your map guide to the various levels of music and fandom. This could be comparable to the different venues in other music games such as Guitar Hero where you work your way from the local stages and clubs to the massive festival stages with tens of thousands of screaming fans.

To get you through this process, what does ever aspiring singer need? Why a music van of course! This is your hub of sorts for all things personal within your career. From fans and singing challenges to podcasts, characters and even avatar customization, you can find it all in one centralized location. Your singing challenges provide you with music tracks that you have unlocked and give you an opportunity to earn up to 3 stars. Upon completion you're awarded a certain amount of singing skill, and the more you level up your singing skill the more items you unlock for your avatar. You will also see two other meters that will climb, the LSMA meter and the Mastery for the area that you're in currently. LSMA stands for Let's Sing Music Awards and think of this as the "battle pass" style reward system where you level up so much and then you can unlock new items for your avatar. Ultimately, that is what Let's Sing 2025 is all about, unlocking new things for your floating head avatar.

Next up is a podcast called Shaw & Tell where they provide you with some type of story driven narrative where the focus is about "most elusive DJ... Neon Ghost" and how these "secret events" are starting to pop up, and how you need to be on the list to attend etc. Basically, this is a way to drive the narrative into the various regions of Soundtown and provide some type of backstory that would make it entertaining outside of just... oh I don't know.... singing?

When you go into the Fan Club, you'll be able to see fake social media posts where they will post inspirational posts to fill your ego. You can also see your fan counter at the top right corner but outside of that, there is literally nothing to do with this feature and seems like an absolute waste of time. This also applies to the Character section of the van, as it could be classified as just a compendium of your encounters with various NPC characters and provide details of each person which means absolutely nothing to you in the game as you gain literally nothing from it, but they are there. If though, you really, really care about your fake artist manager attempting to unwind and having it last 14 minutes, then you can find facts like that here.

The career mode is broken down into several sections of Soundtown. Each one of these modular areas consists of several stages of opportunity to let your vocal range shine through the selection of various karaoke songs. Based off the district that you're in will determine the types of songs that you will get to experience. For example, in the beginning you'll find yourself in the Party District where you'll have an opportunity to select from one of eight different choices of songs. No, you cannot select whatever song you wish to perform so make sure you can find a tune that you like to sing to.

When you go through the event you'll be greeted with a results screen where you'll see how many fans you gained through your performance quality, so the better you perform the more fans you'll gain. Thankfully, after my stellar vocal performance I went from 5 fans to 6 so at least someone else's mom thought I did a great job. When you get through your event there may be some sidequests that you can do during the downtime between your next major events. Helping these other characters means selecting one of the options will lock you out of others, so make sure to find an event that is right for you.

Some of these events can be solo acts, collaborations, or even battles where you compete against your other floating head opponents to see who has the best star power with their voice. When you duel you will be tasked to sing various sections of the song while your opponent does the same, and the rules are very simple; get more stars than your opponent and you win. When you go through these sidequests and complete them, you'll be given a chat through your in-game phone about the next "story" element and how it will grow your career. During these chats you'll get several response options to select, so have fun with the conversation because at the end of the day, you'll be going to the event anyways. These events are tailored to provide you with certain event types such as studio recordings that will take you through the song itself in all aspects and grade you on your performance through the wave meter. The various colors indicate the quality from red being bad, green being good, and even yellow for perfection.

This all sounds interesting, but there are a few issues with the game. To begin, you can't choose if you want to sing different vocal ranges that pertain to being male or female. By not being able to select the varying ranges you'll strain to get your voice to accurately hit the notes which then forces you to not sing the song and basically stick to songs 'in your lane'. This naturally limits selection and that is going to be a major point in just a moment. Limitations are a major focus in Let's Sing 2025. While the vocal limitations are big, they aren't as big as the limitations of music genres. Looking to sing country? You won't find it here. You also won't find a lot of actual content packed within the game itself, and you find yourself forced behind a paywall or be restricted to only a couple songs for your trouble.

You really get the feeling that this is more of an artist promotion game because you feel that some artists have more of their songs while others are completely absent. I'm willing to wager that this is purely based off music rights and the ability to secure the actual songs, but even when you pay for them you get quite a lot more... of the same artists. Even the styles of songs are limited as well. Love songs are limited, and even old school songs are barely there, even with the paid add-ons. When you're doing songs there are parts where you are supposed to talk and others where you're supposed to sing, and that's well and good, but the game doesn't tell you what to do so if you sing, when you should talk, or vice versa, so expect to get dinged in your performance.

The problems regrettably continue on. Let's Sing 2025 essentially forces you to buy the VIP pass in order to gain access to the majority of the library, and when I say how limiting this is, you're basically given less than 10 songs if you don't buy the VIP pass, which is a SUBSCRIPTION. Yes, you will have to pay AGAIN for VIP when it runs out. Bottom line, the songs are tremendously limited in this game, and to put that in perspective, there are PS2 karaoke games where you get 50 songs to choose from without having to be forced to buy VIP to unlock them. You don't pay for the songs; you earn it by playing and unlocking them. In Let's Sing 2025 you have to pay for them. Other issues such as being forced to be a duet for single player career mode just doesn't make sense. You're a single player. One. Singular. Person. Yet you're forced to do duets.

The last issue I have with Let's Sing 2025 is the focus on pronouns. In a music game they focus on making sure you choose the pronouns you want. I've been producing and DJ'ing for over 20 years and I've never focused my music based off the pronoun of the artists. Music comes from the soul. It comes from who we are regardless of what pronouns we are. Pronouns have absolutely zero value or merit when it comes to music and moving forward, if Let's Sing 2025 continues this trend, I'll gladly never play another game of theirs again. When you corrupt something that is pure such as music by not focusing on it, you've lost the scope of the music experience and what it actually means.

So, let's summarize Let's Sing 2025. We have an innovative karaoke game that connects to your smartphone via an app and allows you to use it as a microphone as you go through the needlessly long career mode while you deal with cliche characters and stereotypical situations. All the while limited to what you can sing depending on whether or not you decide to pay more money to unlock the VIP access or be contempt with less than 10 songs and focus on your pronouns and interactions with these stereotypical pandering character faces instead of actually singing good music. Would I pay for this? Never. I would get more enjoyment loading up YouTube, searching for the musical artist that I support their quality music for, and sing along to that, and save tons of money in the process. If you want a good karaoke game, then you can find them as far back as the PS2, but as for Let's Sing 2025, it's a pass for me.

Suggestions:
* Include more song genres.
* Redo the entire Career and make it genre specific.
* Remove the VIP subscription model.
* Allow for altering the octaves to perform in to better suit your vocal range.
* Get rid of pronouns and focus ONLY on the music.

Overall: 7.0 / 10
Gameplay: 7.0 / 10
Visuals: 7.0 / 10
Sound: 8.0 / 10

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STAFF REVIEW of Let’s Sing 2025 (Xbox Series X)

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