I'm going to assume that most people know how to play these things, but In case you don't, I'll some it up real quickly. If you're playing guitar (which is a plastic controller shaped like a guitar), than you push down on a certain button a long the neck, and strum in sequence. For people wondering, it will not teach you how to play guitar. If you're playing drums, you hit the pads and lone foot pedal to match up with those on screen (which actually did help in my routine drum practice. I'm not kidding, if you play this thing long enough, you might be able to keep a straight beat on a real kit). If you're singing, sing the song if you know it. And you can play them all together in a band. Well, that's gameplay in a nutshell.
For people who have played these games in the past, this is more of a spin off game to the recent Guitar Hero five. It has fewer songs, but most of it is the same. The song list is geared towards more of a Top 40 teenpop hits soundtrack than a collection of rocker's favorites. If you're a casual listener who just wants to hear your favorite pop song, than it's a pretty good list, but if you're a dedicated listener like me, you might want to stay away. The songs range from modern Top 40 hits like Fall Out Boy's "Sugar, We're Going Down" and Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me," to sort of a nostalgic guilty pleasure tone like Poison's "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" and Styx's "Mr. Roboto." It's certainly aimed at a wider audience and that's definitely the spirit of the game. It's designed to be very player friendly. Very few songs are hard, you can only fail if someone in your band is playing hard or expert, and you can actually just pick up and play the songs. Literally.
The best feature is that as soon as the game starts up, you can pick a difficulty, a song and just play. Other players can jump in and out on any instrument without screwing you up. You can literally have four people singing the same song if you enough microphones, which is a great thing to do at a party. It's very much a game to bring out at parties. Everyone will probably know the songs, it's easy, and it's easy to set up. The other standout feature, is that you can actually record your own songs. This is the one part on the game that just falls flat. It's much harder to write a good song in this game that it is on a real instrument, and even if you do manage to make something good, the audio quality isn't enough to make it listenable. It's pretty much a useless, time consuming feature.
Other than that, there a few bonuses like the ability to import songs from Guitar Hero five to the game. This WOULD be really cool, but there are two major problems with this. One is that you can only import like half the songs. The next is the real killer. You have to pay for it. Paying for songs you already own? Are video games taxing us now? The only other standout feature is that your band of avatars can be replaced with avatars of real life musicians like Taylor Swift and the singer of Maroon 5 (personally though, I don't care how hot Taylor Swift is, seeing her in the game disgusts me). Like the song imports this is a mixed blessing among features, because you can't really notice while you're looking at the note highway that you have to follow.
Basically, this is the more casual approach to the Guitar Hero formula. The songs are for a wider (and sadly musically ignorant) audience, and the gameplay is more user friendly. If your not a social person who brings people over, don't bother. But if you have friends that like to come over regularly, and they don't think about music as much as nerds like me do, than this is a very good purchase. And maybe after a few months, you could try a real instrument. Because people, I enjoy playing these but there's only so much you can do.
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