Guitar Hero 80s is a blast, but for fans only.
First of all, if you're not one for Guitar Hero in any of its forms, this game is not going to change your mind. Guitar Hero as a series has always been about playing music with a guitar-shaped peripheral controller, and GH: 80s is just more of that with a fluorescent filter poured over everything. The visuals in this game pretty much equal a re-skinned Guitar Hero II: there are lots of hot pinks, bright yellows and sky blues in place of reds, darker yellows and dark blues in the menus, and all the selectable characters have a distinct 80s flavor to their clothing, from Judy Nails' big hair and Axel Steel's bling to Johnny Napalm's skater outfit and The Grim Ripper's red-and-blue 3-D glasses. These things are really for people who are already fans, so again, do not make Encore your first foray into the music-genre field.
GH: 80s is essentially a disc-based expansion for Guitar Hero II: more songs, different outfits, changed backgrounds and that's it, nothing else new. In fact, because this isn't a completely new game, quite a few things have been removed. For one, there are only six characters to choose from: Johnny Napalm, Judy Nails, Izzy Sparks, Pandora, Axel Steel, and The Grim Ripper. They've also removed the RedOctane Club and Stonehenge stages from Guitar Hero II as well as changing the anachronistic Vans Warped Tour to the "Rock For Safety Tour." But GH: 80s keeps all of the good stuff from GH II as well: easy hammer-ons and pull-offs, practice mode, more multiplayer modes and detailed post-song breakdown.
However, to many people all of that is moot, because the music selection is pretty much top-notch. It operates the same way as GHII in that there are 30 songs split into 6 groups of 5 songs each once they are all unlocked, and again considering that it's safe to assume that most people who pick up this game will have little-to-no guitar playing experience the designers tried to make a lot of the music recognizable, while also keeping with the Harmonix tradition of having lesser-known and more obscure songs that still rock anyway. Ask any group of people to try to squeeze an entire decade of music into only 30 songs (no bonus songs this time, unfortunately) and there's a good chance pop/rock songs like A Flock of Seagulls' "I Ran (So Far Away)," Asia's "Heat of the Moment" and The Vapors' "Turning Japanese" would end up in it, only to be plopped right next to heavier stuff like Accept's "Balls to the Wall," Dio's "Holy Diver" and Judas Priest's "Electric Eye." But Harmonix went even deeper into obscurity this time, scraping up songs like "Only a Lad" by Oingo Boingo (who?) and "Because It's Midnite" by Limozeen, a fictional hair metal parody band from the Internet flash series Homestar Runner.
The thing to understand about the music selection is that is belongs squarely in the 1980s. There were '80s songs in GH 1 and 2 (and then subsequently in 3 and Aerosmith), but those songs were much more timeless, whereas songs like "The Warrior," as incredibly fun as it is to play, could never be gotten away with on contemporary music charts. There is simply no pleasing a wide audience when a game tries to represent such a rich musical era into a setlist that can initially be burned through in a few hours, so Harmonix instead decided to choose music that would work with the "guitar" part of Guitar Hero regardless of a given song's popularity. And for additionally snooty music aficionados, there are a total of five master tracks; while I am of the school of thought that covers are no big deal and a player can have fun with a song regardless of it being "real," playing the authentic version of "I Ran (So Far Away)" does make it seem that much more satisfying. As for the rest of the music, it is mostly superb cover musicians with a few oddities here and there: "18 and Life" and "No One Like You" sound spot-on, "(Band Your Head) Metal Health" strangely omits a guitar solo and, scarily enough, "I Wanna Rock" is not a cover, but a re-recording from the real Twisted Sister and it sounds awful.
If you practice your finger-tapping well into the night and watch late-night infomercials with LimeWire open so you can "relive the memories," Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s is probably the game for you. And not to beat a dead horse, but GH: 80s is for music game fans only. Don't bother if you're not already into them.