Even with the lack of online multiplayer Guitar Hero II is a fantastic game even if you already played it on the PS2.
If you somehow happened to miss out on any of the past Guitar Hero's I'll give you a brief explanation of how the game works. When you open up the box the first thing you'll see probably is the guitar it comes with this is your instrument and its used to play all the notes. It has 5 Fret Buttons, a Strum Bar, and a Whammy Bar just for kicks. To actually play the game you have to hold down fret buttons as the notes go by on the screen and then hit them with the strum bar. As the notes go by on the screen you'll see five different colors Green, Red, Yellow, Blue, and Orange. Each color reprasents a different fret button. So to play a note you hold down the matching fret button and strum however many time required on the strum bar. There are also four different diffacultys there is easy which only uses the first three fret buttons, medium which uses all four fret buttons, Hard which has starting to use the orange button, and Expert which has you using all five fret buttons has way more notes then any of the other diffacultys and is more like actually playing the song. During a song how well you're doing is measured by the rock meter. When the rock meter is in the green you're doing great. When its in the yellow you're doing okay. But when it gets down into the red it means you're pretty close to failing the song. There are also other technicques you can use such as star power. You fill up the star power meter by hitting special notes or by using the whammy bar on special notes. Once your star power meter is full enough you tilt your guitar up to activate it. Star Power is a great way to earn points and when your rock meter is in the red it can quickly bring it back up. Another technique that you can use which is very handy are Hammer-Ons/Pull-Offs. Each note has a black circle on the inside. Every now and then you'll see notes that don't have a black circle on the inside. You can do Hammer-Ons/Pull-Offs on these notes. To do either a Hammer-On or a Pull-Off you pretty much switch finger to the other note without strumming. So if there is a green note followed by a red Hammer-On note you strum for the green note and then switch to the red note. On the lower levels you won't really need these but once you get up to hard they become very usefull. At first when you're playing Guitar Hero II you'll probably spend most of your time playing the career mode. In this mode you'll play through the games main 48 songs. The set list is split up into groups of six songs. On easy you'll only have to do either four or five songs depending on where you are on the list. But on the three other diffacultys you'll have to do six songs before you unlock more songs. But there is something different in these other diffacultys. Once you beat the fifth song on the list instead of going to a result screen the crowd will start cheering for an encore. You can play the song right then or you can refuse to play the encore and save that song for a different time. There is also the quick play mode. Where you can pretty much choose any song you've unlocked so far and play it. This is a great mode if you just want to pick it up and play a couple of songs.
Although the gameplay is a very important part of the game in Guitar Hero II the focus is mainly on the music. Guitar Hero II features a large soundtrack with over 70 songs. But sadly a large ammount of these songs aren't very good. They are fun to play but the songs themselves are pretty lame. This is only made worse by the large ammount of bad covers in the game. The majority of the songs are covers with the exception of a few which are mastr tracks. For the most part these covers are great. Some of the really good ones are Carry On My Wayward Son, You Really Got Me, Woman, and a few other songs. But there are also some bad covers and when they mess up the song boy do they mess up the song. The main offenders here are Heart -Shaped Box, Sweet Child O' Mine, and Free Bird but there are other bad covers.
There are also some new features that were not in the PS2 version of Guitar Hero II. The most important one being the 10 added songs my favorite out of these being The Trooper by Iron Maiden. But sadly some of these new songs are really stupid and will make you wonder why they chose these songs instead of some good songs. There is also the addition of online leaderboards. Now you can look at your scores and see how they compare to the other people who play Guitar Hero II. Also since this is an Xbox 360 game there are achievements 50 varied achievements which will take a long time to get giving you more stuff to play for. And lastly there is downloadable content. Its allready been said that the first songs will be songs from the original Guitar Hero but there is also the hope that they could release new songs.
The graphics in Guitar Hero II are pretty good. They are much better then they were on the PS2 but in a game like this graphics don't really matter but they do help. One cool thing is that there are plenty of character animations. If you are ever watching someone else play don't look at the notes going by instead look at the characters and the backgrounds because they are awesome. Each of the eight places you'll play at during your career have something different most of the time being some cool thing in the bacground that does something super crazy before an encore. The character animations are all awesome too each of the characters has a different move they do when they activate star power and they also just feel more alive during a song.
Value wise Guitar Hero II is fantastic. There are four different diffacultys to choose from and if this is your first time playing it'll be a long time before you beat it. Also once you beat it you can still go back and play songs again to try and get a higher rating. And with downloadable content on the way and the slight possibility that online multiplayer could be released later there are plenty of reasons to keep playing this game.
All in all even if you allready played Guitar Hero II on the PS2 there are tons of new features that give you a reason to play the game again and Guitar Hero takes a pretty long time to get old so if you have the money definetly pick this game up.
~LOZFAN6537