Guitar Hero II features contagiously addictive gameplay and a great multiplayer mode in an expanded setlist.

User Rating: 8.6 | Guitar Hero II PS2
By stevenscott14 | Review Date:
Once upon a time, there was a game. The game was seen by many to be one of the greatest rhythm games of all time, mainly because of its memorable plastic guitar, its awesome core formula, and its fantastic tracklist and audio - and the fact that it was accessible and appealing to, well, just about anyone. The game was called Guitar Hero, and it was, first and foremost, an excellent rhythm music game. Now after the first game, the developers had to capitalise upon its success, and, you guessed it, release another game, the predictably and unimaginatively titled Guitar Hero II, a game based on the exact same formula as the first game and a game that simultaneously adds more depth to that core gameplay, improves some of its aspects, and consolidates every single element of it until it can't be called anything other than incredible. Harmonix have hit upon a truly golden gameplay mechanic in the way that you actually feel like you're playing guitar, and if you close your eyes, you can just about imagine the hundreds of grinning, long-haired faces that make up your loving fans and audience. OK, here's how it works. You pick up your plastic Gibson SG replica, you position yourself, you wait for the fretboard to throw some notes your way. There are five colour-coded fret buttons near the neck of the guitar - green, red, yellow, blue, and the dreaded orange - and there is a strum bar positioned on the body where you'd normally pluck the strings. The colour of the note scrolling towards you corresponds to the fret you have to press to get the note, and simultaneously you have to hit the strum bar at the same time that the note hits the target at the bottom of the screen. Eventually, you'll be pulling off incredibly complex sequences and full guitar solos just by putting your fingers on the correct fret and strumming it to the rhythm that the notes form. You get the idea?

The game, first and foremost, is hazardously addictive. You have no idea how many times you say to yourself "just one last song" and end up playing for quite literally hours. Harmonix have really perfected their genius gameplay mechanics in this game and they've even improved the hammer-on and pull-off method that you use to string together some of the more insane guitar solos by sustaining one note and hammering on the frets below it in the same unison as usual. The game also features a Rock Meter, which basically determines the difference to whether you'll pass a song or fail it miserably. It's a three-colour scale (red, yellow, green) and it depicts how impressive your band's performance is. Hit notes, and the meter will gradually point to the green zone. Miss notes, and it will fall through the yellow, eventually into the red, and finally into a warning flashing red - miss any more notes, and the song will fail, your amplifiers will mess up, and your audience are flooded in tidal waves of disappointment and anger. Expect rotten tomatoes to be thrown and a lot of booing.

Just for some added novelty (as if the fact that the game puts you in the position of an alcoholic hotel-trashing guitar god in front of thousands of fans isn't enough of a novelty) the game throws in the awesome mechanic Star Power, that you can activate when you hit every note in a particular note combo and accumulate enough energy from this to send your little rockstar on screen into a frenzy, where they'll most likely pull off a few insane stunts with their guitar and send the crowd wild. The mechanic can save you in a pinch when the Rock Meter falls too far into the red, and it's in a nutshell the best way to regain your audiences' respect.

Guitar Hero seemed to be a hit at parties, family gatherings, and sleepovers, basically in any situation that involved a group of game-hungry persons, Guitar Hero satisfied everyone's needs with its one-more-go gameplay. Guitar Hero II improves on it with a co-operative mode, a face-off mode, and the unlockable pro face-off mode. The co-op is arguably the most fun, as it's great to argue with your companion as to when to tilt the guitar upwards to activate Star Power, and it's just great to sound pretty good together. Face-off just seems pointless and flimsy when you can work together in unison to make music rather than to compete for it. I mean, no band goes to a festival to battle each other. The only real flaws in the gameplay aren't really problems in the core formula. It's just that the difficulty levels aren't scaled very well at all - Easy is a great way for beginners to start, and Medium is likewise good for intermediates, and they're both pretty small steps up from each other. But then Hard is much more in-your-face, uses reasonably complex guitar solos, and requires hammer-ons a little in some of the faster songs, and Expert is the same, there's just a few more complicated additions (three-button chords, a lot of the orange fret, etcetera.) There's no real perfect difficulty setting. Also, the songlist - again, nothing to do with the gameplay mechanics - isn't as good as the first game's. The first game used all styles of rock and thrown them all together in a meeting of classic rock epics and memorable riffs and they really worked. Guitar Hero II uses the same sort of mix, but they aren't necessarily as memorable. Some of the songs you'll forget after the first play. There are some brilliant songs in here, but they are scarce - The Police's Message In A Bottle is amazingly fun to play, Avenged Sevenfold's Beast and The Harlot is also an incredible track, and the mother of all finishers Lynyrd Skynyrd's Free Bird is featured in here as well as the big end to a reasonably good setlist. It's just that some of the songs are just so "meh". Guitar Hero II's charms don't end at the addictive gameplay, though. The graphics are very good in their own way - they take some of rock and roll's greatest quirks and denizens and throws them into a pot pourri of excellently animated character models and weirdly cinematic stages filled with UFO's and rats that hang from rafters backdropped by a thunderstorm or a gigantic moving replica of the Grim Reaper. The main joy of Guitar Hero is in the rockstars themselves - their animations are absurdly good, whether it's in the way that they play the guitar almost like you'd play it in real life, whether it's in their glam-influenced stylings, or whether it's in their facial expressions of triumph or anguish, they are all pretty well designed and animated. The presentation is just all-around tongue in cheek and it's easy to love the game's art direction.

In rhythm games, the audio always has to be at least substantial, if not great, because in a way rhythm games revolve around the music and the sound effects. Guitar Hero II delivers some mixed cover versions, but heck, in the end, no cover version is going to match their originals, so why even bother trying to replicate Axl Rose's or Kurt Cobain's voices if you know you'll never equal them? The instrumentation is top-notch, even if the vocals sometimes sound like they need a little work. In the end, they're all crisply and clearly recorded and they of course sound like their source material to a very high degree. Hats off to Harmonix in this area.

In the end, Guitar Hero II is a very confident sequel for the franchise - it's more of the same contagiously addictive gameplay in a larger setlist and with more sprinkles on top for the more determined and dedicated players. Either way, it's still an absolutely essential game for PS2 owners, and soon to be 360 owners - well worth the extra money for that awesome plastic guitar. Whether you're looking for a great party game to catch everybody's interest, or whether you're looking for some addictive singleplayer gaming to spend all night with, the bottom line remains identical. Buy this game and love it. End of story.

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