Reviewed by Brandy Shaul
After playing last year’s High School Musical 3: Senior Year DANCE! for the Wii, I thought I would have more of a break from the franchise before being forced to experience it again. While the break wasn’t as long as I had expected, the newest entry in the HSM universe, belonging to the Disney Sing It line of karaoke games, wasn’t exactly torture.
As with its dancing counterpart, the singing version of HSM3 allows players to experience songs from all three movies, instead of just the newest installment, as the name might suggest. Gameplay supports up to two players in a very SingStar-esque format, meaning that there is no career mode, no unlockables, and ultimately little direction whatsoever. It’s simply you (and perhaps a friend) with a list of songs to choose from, being quickly sent into the action.
Each song comes with various options, such as whether or not you wish to play the entire song or just a portion of it, and a difficulty selection (easy, normal, and hard), with the difference in difficulties resulting in either a more lenient or more demanding pitch sensitivity. There are also volume options that allow you to adjust your microphones volume in the TV’s speakers, even allowing you to turn it off entirely, if you’d rather not hear yourself through the set (always a great option when playing with kids).
Either way, being that the HSM franchise is aimed primarily at children, the pitch sensitivity throughout the game, whether playing with one or two microphones, is incredibly forgiving, allowing you to even take a breath in the middle of a note and still grant you full points.
Much like other karaoke games, the better your performance, the higher your score, with bonus multipliers being applied at various intervals, if your performance is good enough to warrant them, that is. Oddly enough, these bonus multipliers are fairly temporary. Instead of lasting until you screw up, or indefinitely if you continue to successfully sing each note on key, they instead have an arbitrary time limit, causing you to go back to 1x, and work your way back up to the 4x peak as the song continues.
As you sing, you can watch the original film clips play at the top of the screen in all of their overacted glory, filled with supposedly catchy dance routines and attempts to make Zac Efron appear masculine. My own prejudice against the actual films aside, there are a handful of songs within the game that deserve a spot in this music fan’s library, regardless of their origins. Luckily, the game allows you to tackle the entire song list from the beginning. No need to unlock songs, or make you way through them in a specific order; you can get straight to the good songs while skipping all of the crap.
Another positive feature is the abundance of game modes to choose from. There is the standard quick play mode, allowing you to sing one individual song in the hopes of earning enough points to land a spot on the game’s leader boards, along with a dedicated Single Player mode, containing three modes in and of itself.
The first is Sing It Pro, which serves as a virtual voice coach and helps you learn the lyrics and melodies of each song by playing portions of each, and requiring you to accurately sing the same portion before moving onto the next.
The second is the You’re On Your Own! mode, which removes the lyrics, score and pitch markers from the screen, but still keeps track of your performance in the background, only revealing your score at the end of the song. Finally, Gig Mode allows you to choose up to five songs to play in immediate succession, without having to stop in between to tweak difficulties, etc.
In terms of multiplayer gameplay, there are Quick Play duets and versus modes as options, with a multiplayer version of Gig Mode rounding out the selection. Unfortunately, no online multiplayer is supported.
Not so unfortunate are the crisp and streamlined menus, that work well to simplify the customization options for players of any age. Likewise, even though most of the songs are, in my humble opinion, of very questionable quality, you can use the game as a music player if you so choose, by simply hovering over each song and allowing both it, and the accompanying film clip to play in the middle of the menu screen.
Since the game relies so heavily on footage from the film, the audio and video quality understandably go above and beyond the level of most other karaoke games, and rivals that of the SingStar franchise, which has always been known for its realism.
Ultimately, but not surprisingly, Disney Sing It: High School Musical 3 – Senior Year is a game made with previous fans of the series in mind. There’s no explanation of the storyline, which will present very little continuity to those unfamiliar with the films, but it offers enough content to keep every tween girl (and even those non-fans who can appreciate the better songs that the franchise offers) coming back for more.
Special thanks to Disney Interactive Studios for providing a copy of this title.