Guitar Hero II: Thoughts and Review

[Image: gh2 big]Guitar Hero II
Score: 93%

I realized part of the way into my arbitrary review and rating system that all of these reviews are going to be heavily biased towards the top of the scale. This is because I’m incapable of finishing games that don’t rank at least an 85% on my scale, and I only score the games that I finish.

Oh well, you’ll have to live with that.

Guitar Hero II needs no introduction. Guitar Hero itself probably doesn’t need an introduction anymore. I remember I played it for the first time in my Resident Advisor’s room at Occidental College. Since I already had (and still have) a healthy addiction to Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero was not a particularly big leap for me. I was immediately hooked.

Guitar Hero II follows in the footsteps of it’s predecessor, lining up a fairly large collection of songs and impressively good set of tracks for all levels of play. One of the things about II that impresses me the most is that they didn’t overcomplicate the game - a common pitfall when developers follow up a breakout success.

Guitar Hero’s greatest strength, in my mind, is its core simplicity, and that practically any guest feels that picking up a little plastic guitar and hitting buttons can’t possibly be all that beyond them. Add to that the new split multiplayer capabilities and hit songs from the likes of Sting, and you have a winner.

So why, you ask, have I scored this game at 93%?

No game (yet) is perfect, and this one is no exception. Several of the songs in the soundtrack are covers, and some of them (Rage) are inevitably worse than others. Most of them aren’t bad enough to be noticeable, but some of them are. Given the roaring success that the first game has been, I find it hard to believe that they couldn’t find room in their pockets to shell out for the rights to the real song.

I also have the PS2 version, not the Xbox 360 version, so I can’t speak to this conclusively, but my understanding is that even in the 360 version of the game it is impossible load up your own song from a CD or mp3, construct your own track, and play it. There are probably legal issues with allowing this, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t an awesome and obvious feature that their lawyers should definitely be clearing for the next game right now.

The rest of my gripes are fairly individual and fairly small, but as a whole they pull together to take the game down a notch or two. Guitar Hero II is incredibly fun and has incredible replayability, but it is fundamentally limited in scope. I don’t have the faintest idea how to expand the gameplay without overcomplicating the game and screwing things up, but that problem will need to be solved before it can earn a higher score from me.

You also can’t use any other guitar as the Grim Ripper. As I refuse to play anyone other than the Grim Ripper, this annoys me to no end. The bonus tracks are still largely crap. The game, plus controllers, is too big of an investment to ask of gamers. The trend towards expensive hardware needs to but curbed, and Harmonix is not doing anything to help.

Don’t let this fool you. I love Guitar Hero II. It is, surprisingly enough, much better than Guitar Hero, and I will be playing it for a long time. If, for some odd reason, you haven’t picked up either of them, I’d suggest you pull that second mortgage and throw down like a rock star.