Band Hero Hands-on
It's so...pink.
October 9, 2009 - If you haven't noticed, music games have taken over. What was once one plastic guitar on the PlayStation 2 has mutated into Guitar Hero 5, Guitar Hero: Metallica, The Beatles: Rock Band, Rock Band Unplugged, song packs, downloadable content, Guitar Hero: Van Halen, and so much more.
Now, Activison, the folks pumping out the majority of these plastic instrument-packing games, is set to unleash another disc for your rocking collection called Band Hero and the company just let me play it for the first time.
If you've missed IGN's coverage of the game thus far, Band Hero is taking aim at the less than hardcore rockers out there. This is Guitar Hero in a lot of ways except that there are a lot more options to make the game easier and less intimidating -- Activision is looking to get the families aching to rock out to Top 40 hits.
![[IMG]](http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/image/article/103/1033928/band-hero-20091009051413562-000.jpg)
Purple haze all around.
Just like all the music games before it, you'll select an instrument in Band Hero and have a track onscreen to watch. As colored notes descend on the screen, you need to hit the corresponding button on your guitar or drum set. If you're singing, the words are on top of the screen -- you can set them to be static, scrolling, or Karaoke-style -- and you need to fill in pitch and timing bars with your voice. It's literally the same mechanic you've seen a million times before.
The track list packs artists like Taylor Swift, Maroon 5, the Jackson 5, and other pop radio hit makers. Depending on the mode -- career's here and packs the "rise to the top" mentality we've seen so many times before -- players can drop in and out at will and change their settings on the fly so one guy playing guitar on expert doesn't ruin it for everyone.
If you are looking to take on your friends and prove you're the king or queen of rock and roll, Band Hero's RockFest gives you the opportunity to prove your worth in a variety of competitions. Elimination breaks the song up into segments, and the player with the lowest score at the end of each segment is booted; Do or Die temporarily knocks you out if you miss three notes in a song section so that you're not scoring but your opponents are; Perfectionist does the sectioning off bit again and only gives points to players who perform perfectly; Pro Face Off sets the opponents loose on the same song with the same instrument at the same time; Momentum changes a song's difficulty as you play; and Steakers only awards you points if your current note steak is a multiple of 10.
With my hands-on time this afternoon, I grabbed my guitar and went to town on some Quickplay and Career goodness. Within moments of actually getting into the game, I can tell you one thing -- get ready for neon colors and lots of pink. Everything here has that saccharin edge to it that makes it seem like you're eating too much candy. Pink hair, crazy light shows, and more are rampant in this title.
Anyway, I won't bore you with rehashing everything about the modes because they play just as you'd expect. Quickplay let me choose one of the game's songs and jump in with any friends who wanted to. I cold be one of the preset characters or I could jump into the character creation tool ("Rock Star Creator") and make a character in line with all the other music game/rocker creation suites we've seen.
![[IMG]](http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/image/article/103/1033928/band-hero-20091009051411765-000.jpg)
The sun is exploding!
Meanwhile, Career let me enter a band name, choose a logo and go about creating my legacy. Rather than playing in the beat-down, filthy venues most struggling musicians start in, this story starts with some brightly colored cartoon kids in front of the TV before heading to a Mall competition. At the mall, there's some Coke product placement, a store called "Gamer Lifestylez," and so much more neon around the stage.
Now, when you're choosing the song you're going to play, you get a Bonus Challenge from the menu. These can be for a specific instrument -- "Bring Me To Life" by Evanescence challenges you to hold a 4x multiplayer as a singer for as long as you can to earn a new outfit -- or just all around band goals. If also shows you how many songs you've already earned on a track and gives you a fact about the band.
Inside, the game plays like you'd expect with buttons, Star Power, and the like. There are new bells and whistles like the fact that when you hit a Band Moment, which is basically playing perfectly together at a specific time, your tracks light up on fire, but aside from the new visuals everything is what you'd expect.
One odd thing several editors and myself noticed was a significant amount of note blurring. Most of the time everything would look normal on the screen, but sometime notes would be coming down and be blurred to hell. At first we thought it was because we were missing notes or something, but subsequent tests proved that missing or hitting had no effect on when the notes decided to look like crap. Hopefully, Activision can iron that out by the game's November release date.
Band Hero appears to have a very specific target market in mind; namely, people like me who prefer music pitched by Ryan Seacrest to hardcore rockers. The Guitar Hero formula the game is borrowing is tried and true, so the game's success comes down to how many people are willing to pony up and play a game overdosing on purple and pink.
[gb]Screenshots[/gb]
|
