Guitar Hero II

"Guitar Hero 2 is the most fun I’ve had with a video game in years."

When I heard about the success of the first Guitar Hero game, I was perplexed. I mean, I dislike DDR immensely and this was just another rhythm game. It couldn't be all that good could it? You would be surprised what a fun difference a peripheral can make. Once I had the money for it, I decided to give Guitar Hero 2 a chance. That was probably the best choice I have made since buying Final Fantasy 3 for the SNES. This game will join that one as one of my favorite games of all time.

Much like in the last game, there is no storyline of any importance to this game. You are the main guitarist for a cover band and it's up to you to bring your band up from performing at a local high school battle of the bands to huge stadiums. And that's about the length and breadth of the story for this game. It's simply a great excuse to play some great songs, and some lesser known ones. This is what the game excels at and they make sure you get your money's worth.

The gameplay for this game is about as basic as it gets, but in that simplicity is the games beauty. It makes it superbly easy for just about anyone to pick this game and start playing really easily. You only need to be able to time your presses of the fret buttons, five colored buttons (green, red, yellow, blue and orange) on the neck of the guitar, with the colored notes that appear onscreen and be able to hit the strum bar at the same time. If a pair of notes appear onscreen, you hold two buttons and strum. But if you see a chord, you have to hold down the fret buttons after you strum until the notes end.

The trick is playing these notes sequentially to try and build up a multiplier which can go up to a four times one. It takes ten notes played in a row to increase your multiplier, so you have to be able to hit at least thirty in a row to get it to a four times multiplier. By playing enough notes with a good multiplier you can try to aim for a high score. You will need to acquire a high enough score to get as many stars as you can to unlock things. Ill address this matter more a bit further down.

While game sounds simple, and it mostly is, there are a few things you need to learn when playing this game. The first thing you need to master is the Star Power meter. You can build this up by playing star power notes; these are colored star shapes as opposed to the regular circles. You play these like the normal ones, even the chords, and when you successfully play a series of them in a row you gain ¼ of your star power bar. When you have your bar half full, or more, you can enter star power mode by tilting the guitar upwards. In this mode, your multiplier is doubled giving you the ability to just rake in the points like crazy.

The higher your score, the more stars you will earn at the end of the song. The more stars you get the more money you are given to unlock things. So you have to play the songs as good as you can in addition to using star power properly. By doing this you get enough money to unlock the plethora of things to be unlocked. These range from guitars and guitar skins to secret characters and different costumes for the normal characters. You will need as much money as you can get to unlock everything. The only great thing is that you don't need to unlock these things on every difficulty like you do in the first one. Unlock a guitar and secret character you wish to use on medium and it will be useable on hard for the next time you play through the game.

The graphics are much more impressive than they were in the first game. While they still take a backseat to the audio and gameplay, they look much nicer. The game has something of a rock and roll cartoon feel to it. Many of the visuals for the stages and characters are very silly and drawn in an over the top way, but they still look quite good. This is especially true for the venues that you will play in.

The audio in this game is top notch, even if the songs are simply cover songs as opposed to the actual songs. Many of the cover songs are actually pretty good imitations of the actual songs. However, the quality of the cover songs has greatly improved from the last game as well as the quality of the bonus tracks themselves. There are a number to be unlocked and I found myself having more fun playing many of these, more than I did playing the main songs to the game. They draw from an interesting assortment of places, even going so far as to use Trogdor, a song from the Strongbad email show, and a show from Death Klock, the band featured in Metalocalypse, a show on Cartoon Network.

A new feature to the game is the encore, where your after playing three or four songs to completion (this depends on difficulty level), you will be asked to come back out onstage. Should you do play it at that moment or wait until later, you will start off with a full rock meter, the gauge that determines how good you're playing. By beating these songs you will move on to the next set of songs.

Overall, Guitar Hero 2 has improved on the first game in every way, except for song choice. But as that is a matter of taste, it's very easy to ignore that and not let it faze you very much. As it stands, I think that this is one of the best games ever made and I know that now I am a Guitar Hero addict. They've got a new sucker to buy all of their games and I am proud to do so. Don't miss out on this game if you can help it or you're really depriving yourself of a wonderful time.

Pros: The game responds much better, advanced techniques are far easier to use and the multiplayer co-op mode is a lot of fun to play.

Cons: Many of the songs are not the most popular or interesting and the difficulty is up from the last game. While I like this it might put some off.

Score: 9

Recommendation: Even if you only play the game on medium difficulty, you are doing yourself a major disservice if you don't at least play this game.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 02/23/07