Tuning up the Band E10+ style

by Kyle Thomson-Diks

Fun factor: Average

Worth to: Rent

Hardware issues aside, ‘Band Hero’ adds a few customization improvements, but as with any game geared at the mass market, not everything will be to everyone’s liking.

Band Hero, one of the newest releases from Activision Publishing is yet another installment to the hit Guitar Hero games, this time making a break from the heavy-hitting Rock and Metal genres and getting into the more singable toe-tapping Pop genre.

Easy as 1, 2, 3

As far as graphics go, it looks like any other Guitar Hero game with venues ranging from the basement pub to the high-end Japanese stage. Being on the newest generation consoles helps a bit in that department but the only real improvements I could see from previous games is in the motion capture, which I imagine has hit its peak now for these games. Lip syncing with the in-game characters is done well, though only a stickler like me would bother to notice.



I do appreciate the lessening of the product placement from World Tour. Now the scenes actually feel like stages and not a pile of boxes with company logos stamped all over them.

Gameplay is standard and almost nothing has changed from previous games. Drums go in the middle, bass on the right, guitar on the left, and vocals scroll across the top. The colors move exactly as they should, though a warning to hardcore Heroes: if you’re looking for a challenge, look elsewhere, as each song is listed with a rating out of 10 for each instrument and nowhere in any song is there a guitar portion rated higher than 6.

In no Hero game is there a more obvious skew towards vocals, though I feel like I should have seen that coming as Pop songs are all about the vocalists. If there is no other indication, the ratings give it away perfectly, with most songs rating from 5 to 10 in difficulty. I suspect, however, that while the included microphone does pick up more than previous versions, it still has great difficulty picking up slides in pitch, more often jumping from high to low (and causing me to lose my combo) or vice versa whenever I tried.

Fun for the mass market

While it was fun for me, as I’ve cultivated an intense love for the Hero games over several years, I can’t say with any amount of certainty that the production of Band Hero was in any way extensive or involved. Above I described a problem I have with my microphone, but that was not nearly as memorable as the drums. A warning to those who may read this before deciding whether to buy the game: the drum sets are buggy and have a high probability of not working at all. Sorry guys, you may have added a 5th button to the drum schematic but you didn’t make them work any better. I am the proud owner of not one, but two drum sets, that don’t work or broke after 24 hours. I could get into the unhelpfulness of their online support for Band Hero, but that’s an issue for another day. In short, unless you are actually allergic to the other instruments, I recommend buying the incomplete set or the game a la cart, because the previous Hero game’s instruments are all compatible with this one.



I was impressed though with a new function added to Band Hero that sets it apart from other Hero games in the series; that is the ability to add up to 4 of the same instrument at the same time. So now all four of you can sing along to Spice Girl’s “Wannabe” or Bass your way through any one of the three Taylor Swift songs.

Speaking of the songs there are an impressive range of them, so someone of almost any taste in Pop or light Rock will find something they can jam to. By that same note, I can’t imagine anyone liking “all” the songs here, but I guess that’s what marketing to the largest possible audience is all about, and let’s face it, they don’t need to release another Guitar Hero expansion set. Also, in keeping with the E+ rating, the producers have censored several songs from alcohol references. So “Drinking whiskey and rye” is now “Drinking ___ and rye” which is a little sad, because A) it’s my favorite song in the track list and B) they missed rye.

The sound is what you’d expect from a Hero game. If any one instrument is too low you can turn it up to the expense of others in the options menu. Nothing spectacular about the sound, but nothing to complain about either, which is a little strange considering the biggest part of the game should be about the sound.

I actually can’t think of any game with more lasting appeal than a Guitar Hero game. For me at least, the songs are different and likable enough to have me sliding the game back in on a daily or weekly basis at least. Though again, a challenge junky will likely move through this game at lightning speed because there’s just not enough of a challenge in any song to keep them coming back. Even the vocals, if you know the songs already, don’t really hold their own at higher difficulties.

Summary

Overall I enjoyed playing Band Hero like I enjoyed playing Guitar Hero games back when I started. I’m not placing any awards on the Leaderboards, but that’s not why I play. I can recommend this game to anyone who enjoys a good party title and who isn’t embarrassed to let loose with some Duran Duran or Evanescence once in a while.