$100 on a single game is a big investment so the value for your money needs to be significant. GH2 delivers that value.
The Good: The game makes you feel like a rock star, plain and simple. In particular, if you have surround sound and a VGA cable, which I do, this game is just plain fun. With a wide selection of excellent song offerings, and truly good sound quality, this game makes you feel like you’re actually playing the songs. The crowds react realistically when you either hit a sequence of difficult notes or grown in disappointment when you miss. The game scales the difficulty appropriately and there are tons of unlockables.
The Bad: When you think about it, this is really nothing more than many classic rock songs turned into one long mini-game. The guitar controller itself feels like it was made for pygmies. The graphics are below par for a 360 game. The songs can start to feel a bit repetitive.
Dropping nearly $100 on a single game is a big investment for most people, and therefore the value for your money needs to be significant in order to justify the cost. Guitar Hero 2 is a game that delivers that value. Right off the bat, the gamer is treated to a pure rock style intro with an over the top, comically funny sequence that shows a male guitarist and a female guitarist fighting it out over a miniature city like they were two monsters in one of those cheesy Japanese Godzilla movies. This sets the tone for how the entire game is going to play out from there forward.
The characters that the game throws at you are appropriately differentiated from one another to give everyone a feeling that they can select one that appeals to their own individual musical or stylistic tastes. It says a lot about the diverseness and growth of rock in general that the game has everyone from the black, wavy haired guy that could be straight out of the sixties to a goth chick to a Kiss/Aerosmith wannabe jammer represented. Once you’ve grabbed your rocker and selected from your initially quite limited guitar options you’re ready to jump right in on Easy mode. And, for most people, Easy mode is going to be a good place to start. This is a game that doesn’t hesitate to punish folks who feel that they are already bad to the bone and ready to hop right into Hard or Expert mode. In this game, difficulty levels mean a lot more than they do in most games.
Speaking of difficulty, the songs do a good job of slowly ramping up the challenge on the rocker initiate. While those who aren’t as familiar with many of the song offerings (like me) will probably have a greater challenge than those who know what the songs are supposed to sound like, Easy mode will still be pretty simple for most. The good thing about it is that it lets those who may never have heard some of the songs get exposed to them, which helps out significantly once they choose a more challenging level.
On Medium level and above, the game pays you for your performances. Pay is always pretty small because your rocker is supposedly such a rebel that he feels the need to do everything from spit on the floor and intimidate the bouncers to imbibing truly staggering dollar values of top shelf booze. Still, it is a nice system. You get your cash and can use it to unlock more songs, guitars, characters, costumes, etc.
For those who are interested in such things, the achievements for the game run the gambit. Some, such as refusing to do an encore or failing a song on easy, are shockingly easy to earn. Others, like getting a 1000 note streak going, will probably elude all but the most dedicated of rockers forever.
Moving on, the graphics aren’t particularly impressive. They get the job done mostly because anyone looking at the game will be spending most of their time frantically watching the notes coming at them and because their focus will be on the sound quality anyway. Other than that, the bodies are painfully obvious as ports from the PS2 version of the game. They move in an unnatural fashion and have unnatural dimensions. Another thing that will distract most gamers from paying attention to the graphics is their struggles with the guitar itself. The damn thing is light, and tiny. I don’t know what age group Red Octane was targeting when they designed it, but it can’t have been adults. The next needs to be longer, the frets need to be spaced a bit further apart so you aren’t constantly worrying about pushing the wrong one during fast sections and the entire thing needs a heavier, more solid feel to it.
Many will complain that it should have been wireless, but the fact that it is wired doesn’t really bother me or my live-in girlfriend. Neither of us feel the need to hop around or do gymnastics while we’re playing the game and the cord is long enough that it isn’t really a problem. Would we be happier with a wireless controller? Probably. Are we going to lose a lot of sleep over the fact that it isn’t? Nope.
Last but definitely not least we finally get to sound quality. This is where the game shines. The mapping of your performance to the sound output of the game is spot on. When you hit or miss a note, you can tell immediately. There is no ambiguity to it. Perhaps even more importantly, the game just sounds incredible. The notes are clear and concise, with each one distinct. The song selection is, for the most part, solid when you consider what the game is trying to do: make you feel like a rocker. Many of the guitar solos are insane, and, when played on the previously mentioned weak guitar controller, can lead to cramping on extended songs. Difficult songs with a lot of notes make a great deal of sense for the game, but it would have been nice if there was a bit more variety in the song offerings. Nearly all the music is pretty heavy stuff, which makes some of the lighter songs like “Carry on My Wayward Son” by Kansas a welcome relief.
Overall, Guitar Hero 2, despite the barrier to entry represented by the high cost, is a solid offering that is well worth the price of admission. It is a game that will appeal to fans of many game genres and will almost certainly be a surefire hit whenever you entertain guests for drinking and card games.