Guitar Hero

DLC Review from Matt - Tuesday, 29 June 2010 @ 12:08pm

I reviewed RockBand for the iPhone way back and was pretty impressed. Now there’s a new player in town. My preferred title, the great Guitar Hero, has finally made it across to the iPhone, and the game doesn’t disappoint.

Graphics are crisp and bright, everything moving along at a fair clip. If you know the Guitar Hero and related games you know the general idea – tap when the dots get to the bottom of the screen. There are four bars, star power is deployed by dragging on a star that’s above your tappy buttons, it’s all the sort of thing you pick up very quickly. There are some minor additions that make it a worthy entry. One is “strums”. Rather than just having to strum roughly like you do for the “real” games, the iphone title makes you strum specific strings, or more accurately specific pairs of strings. Adding this to the usual slides, taps and chords makes for an entertaining and engaging game, exactly what you would expect of Guitar Hero.

Customisation options aren’t bad. They’re more limited than the full games, of course, but entertaining enough. One thing I like is that you start with a female character, and have to select male, rather than simply assuming male as the default, or worse, only. Most of the customisation options are actually unlocked through what essentially comes down to an Achievement within the game. Get a 8x multiplier on bass, that sort of thing.

Track listing isn’t too bad. Queen is represented why not. Vampire Weekend’s Cousins is a nice addition, it has some great guitar work. Seven Nation Army is an interesting choice. The song (hell, the band) doesn’t have a bass part, it’s all guitar. Considering 99% of rock songs feature guitar and bass picking that song for a game that you play either bass or guitar is just plain weird. There’s also some emo metal bullshit from Savior. Meh.

So the game is solid, but as always the real question is whether it represents value for money.

The answer in this case is no. Or hell no. Or fuck no. Or just read the comments for the game on the iTunes App Store.

For $4 there are a total of six songs with Guitar Hero. Six. Motherfucking SIX. You can buy more songs, but the listing of downloadable tracks is very sparse and they’re expecting you to pay $2.49 for three songs. There are none free. If you’re a huge Vampire Weekend fan there are four VW songs here total, for $6.50, and I suppose that’s not bad.

Contrasting this with what else is on the market doesn’t go well for GH. RockBand is $9, but comes with 26 songs, and there are some free on the store. Song packs are $1.19 for two songs, though the store is pretty empty too. You also get to play guitar, drums, or even sing. Ok, so the singing is just a particularly crap tap rhythm game too, but hey.

It compares even less well with Tap Tap Revenge, which has (apparently) about 100 free songs, and the app is completely free. Track packs are 2 for $1.19 as well, and a lot more diverse than either Rock Band or Guitar Hero.

Pros

Game itself is really good, playing GH on the move, achievements system is quite fun, some good songs.

Cons

Need WiFi to download tracks. Tracks too expensive. SIX SONGS. Other users complain of a lot of bugs, crashing, etc, esp on a 3G.