If this is how it's like to be in American Idol I would've won a hundred times over and I'd be famous. Sadly it's not.
The basic goal of American Idol is to get your butt up on the stage and sing some tunes and that's it. Yeah, that's it, nothing more. When you start the game you are granted three choices, you can either jump right in and audition for American Idol and win the damn thing, or you can practice or you can play a game mode called "Endurance" which means you'll get up on stage and sing some. Well, that's what American Idol is about, sing! What do I expect it to be? Well sure, I could accept that the only thing you do in the game is to sing, but what I can't accept is that it takes less than 15 minutes to complete the damn thing and unlock all 30 unlockable items in the game.
It all comes down to the Competition mode, here you are auditioning for American Idol and the judges are there, just as you expected them to be. Man, I hope I don't mess up in front of Simon. But before you can start to compete you must first create a character. There's few choices to be made so they all basically look the same. Once you have created yourself a character you can move on. Well on the stage you'll see that there's a big circle and a marker which circles around this circle. As the music starts to play small A- and B-icons show up around the circle and the marker starts to circle around it. Once these icons show up in the centre of the icons your goal is to press the button the icon tells you to. Quite simple and quite a smart way, instead of using those same old descending arrows and so forth that almost all music games uses today. The most boring thing with this is though that it never climbs that much in difficulty, because you just use the A and B button. The developers clearly forgot the L+R buttons.
You'll quickly realize that it's not hard at all to get atleast 90% completion on all songs. When I first played the game I never got under 80% completion on a song. The songs are pretty dull and you can mostly just choose between two or three songs to sing.
Well okay, it's not challenging, please tell me it has funny commentaries by Simon. Sorry dude, it hasn't. Simon basicly just tells you in a polite way that he didn't like it, nothing like he does in the show. I'm one of those guys who just watches the first 4-5 episodes of the Idol-series because it's always funny to see people with no talent (pretty much like myself when it comes to singing). But there's no pleasure here. You get the same commentaries over and over again.
Once you have completed the Competition mode you have unlocked almost everything there is to unlock, and the only things unlockable is all the songs you just have sung, and more clothes for your character (which doesn't make him/her look any better).
The only fun with American Idol is the challenge in getting 100% completion on the last songs of the game, that is something of a challenge but shouldn't be that hard to do. If you truly must have this game, well check your bargain bin for it because it's not worth any hard earned money. Not even money you've found on the streets.