punkrawka's Full Review: Activision Guitar Hero II Bundle (047875950658) fo...
I've been stuck at 399 reviews on this site for months, partly due to being busy (just like everyone else), but also in large part because every time I get some free time, I debate between sitting down and writing a review, or going down to work on my Guitar Hero II skills on Xbox 360. Unfortunately, my pretend rock stardom keeps winning out, so I thought it fitting that I break my writer's block (and my 400-review barrier) on the game itself.
What is Guitar Hero?
So apparently, you've been living under a rock. That's OK. Basically, Guitar Hero is a video game in which the player (or players) use a smallish plastic guitar controller to "play" the guitar parts to a wide range of songs. If you're thinking "This sounds like Dance Dance Revolution for rock fans" or "This sounds like a way for middle-class suburban men to avoid confronting the fact that they've sold out," well, you're right, but also, go [bleep] yourself on that second part. The Guitar Hero franchise rose to fame on the PlayStation 2, and Guitar Hero II is the first to bridge the platform divide and show up for Xbox 360 owners.
What's Good?
The great thing about this game is simple -- players can live out their rock star fantasies on a variety of tracks ranging from the '70s to modern hits, from southern and pop rock to death metal. You can play the songs in seven different venues in career mode, customizing your guitarist, guitar and band name. There are also in-game bonus tracks from lesser-known artists that don't come up in career mode but are available for kicks -- with over 80 songs in all, it'll take quite a while to become bored with the selection here. The game's graphics are nothing dazzling, as the animation is a bit fuzzy at times, but the main event on-screen is the scrolling guide telling you which notes and chords to hit anyway. The gameplay is more interesting than merely hitting the notes, as getting streaks will give you score multipliers, and collecting "Star Power" and deploying it by dramatically tilting your guitar gives you a brief doubler on top of the regular multiplier. Hitting 40 notes in a row for a 4x multiplier and then turning it to 8x with Star Power is a great way to rack up points, and is a challenge to piece together routinely on many tracks.
Every player will have different favorite songs, but being more of a heavy metal guy, I'd have to say that the most fun tracks are Lamb of God's "Laid to Rest", Anthrax's "Madhouse" and Megadeth's "Hangar 18." For more mainstream tastes, Pearl Jam's "Life Wasted" and of course Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird" provide ample replay value. You can play any track in the game at four skill levels -- beginner, medium, hard and expert -- and at each level you will have to use a greater number of buttons, or hit them in faster and more complex combinations.
What's New?
A lot of buzz surrounded the way that the next-generation Xbox 360 might upgrade over the original Guitar Hero II from PS2. Overall, though, the changes are not that significant. The primary upgrades come via Microsoft's great Xbox Live service, where users can compare scores on the Leaderboards (the overall career score is especially enticing to replay hard songs over and over), as well as downloading even more bonus songs (for an additional fee). Aside from that, you're essentially playing the same game as PS2 owners loved, just getting it on the Xbox 360, which isn't that raw of a deal.
What's Lame?
To pick on Guitar Hero II, you have to nitpick. That said, there is some obvious room for improvement (most of which will hopefully be met in Guitar Hero III, due out in Fall 2007). The first and most obvious is that the "Guitar X-Plorer" controller is not wireless. Everything is wireless these days, but in a game that practically demands pacing, jumping and stomping around, players are chained to their consoles by a physical wire. Secondly, while the availability of bonus download songs is excellent, the songs released to date are expensive ($5 for three songs), and mostly songs that were originally derived from the original Guitar Hero for PlayStation. There are a few notably awful songs (The Sword's "Freya" and Made in Mexico's "Yes We Can" jump to mind). And with all of the online functionality added to the Xbox version of the game, the absence of online multiplayer is both surprising and disappointing.
The Verdict
Unless you find the entire concept of play-musicianship to be lame and/or appalling, odds are that you will have a blast playing Guitar Hero II. While the Xbox version is not a leap over the PS2, having and playing some edition of this game is something that just about anyone can enjoy (though I've noted in my own experience that men/boys generally seem more interested than girls/women). All in all, it's hard to find major flaws with this game, and it's one of the more ceaselessly entertaining video games I've owned in quite some time, taking an innovative idea and providing a variety of tracks for ample replay value.
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