Pros: Fun Gameplay. Freestylin’.
Cons: Repetitive intro cut scenes.
While Activision’s Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock tried to lure players in with an elaborate story, their other new rhythm game, DJ Hero 2, takes the opposite approach. Relentlessly anti-story, the game portrays the life of a DJ as one in which you go to clubs, wave at the audience in exactly the same way every time and then mash up a bunch of songs. DJ Hero 2 refuses to let story get in the way of gameplay.
The Basics: Mash-Up DJing
The basics of DJH2 are the same as those of the first DJ Hero game. The player has a plastic turntable peripheral that allows him or her to emulate mixing and scratching. An onscreen indicator tells players when to scratch, when to crossfade tracks and when to push one of three buttons. On the highest difficulty settings the game is fantastically complex, requiring players to do several things at once, while at simpler settings the game is tricky but doable. Scratching, which was maddeningly unforgiving in the first game, is more reasonable in this one.
When I played the original game, I found the mash-up songs the game centers around so interesting that I wished I could do my own. Once again, DJH2 has some wonderful mash-ups (such as a terrific mix of Stevie Wonder’s Superstition with Edwin Starr’s War), but while it doesn’t offer the sandbox mixing mode I desired, it does offer a greater degree of freedom and creativity. At certain points in songs players enter a freestyle mode in which they can mix the two songs as they like, and it is tremendous fun to find that you can really isolate certain words in one song and make them pop out of the rhythm track of the other. There are also areas where scratching can be done to your own rhythm.
If you have two turntables, you can compete with friends. There are a variety of competitive modes in which you can try to get the highest successful streak for a song, or get the most points in a section. The most notable multiplayer mode is DJ battle, in which two players play different sections of a song. In the freestyle sections, the fastest DJ gets control while the other DJ sits and waits. DJ battles also occur in single-player mode.
I invited my friend Andrew over to check out multiplayer mode. Andrew’s gaming consists primarily of playing Atari 2600 games on an emulator, but he seemed to quite enjoy playing a video game from this century.
Difficulty: Well Ranged From Simple to Impossible
The nice thing about playing in multiplayer competitive mode is that no matter how badly you play, the song doesn’t end, because you’re not trying to beat the game but only beat your friend. This allowed me to try out even the highest difficulty settings, which I couldn’t play in single-player mode for more than a few seconds. It also allowed Andrew to try out something either than easy.
The difficulty of a song depends on both the complexity of the song’s rhythms and the difficulty setting the player chooses. Thus I could play a very simple song on a high difficulty setting, but the most complex songs were difficult even on a medium setting. Sometimes even on the hardest settings the player is eased into the song, but just when you start thinking, this isn’t so bad, you are suddenly required to do a crazed flurry of cross-fades and button presses.
DJH2 also lets someone grab a microphone and sing and rap in karaoke mode, but neither I nor Andrew had any interest in doing so.
Verdict: Fun Game That Somewhat Betters the Original
When I reviewed the first game, I noted that while the guitar-driven Guitar Hero and Rock Band games made me feel like a musician, the button-pressing of DJ Hero made me feel like I was playing a videogame. But while most of the additions to the sequel seem small, the freestyle mixing and scratching help to make you feel more creative, and at times I really felt like a DJ, laying down beats or whatever it is DJs lay down.
As I began to get into the DJ mindset, I began to wonder, what kind of story should a DJ game have. I know nothing about the life of a DJ, but I’m picturing a life of sleepless, cocaine-fueled nights, drunken sex, desperate attempts at fame and profound hearing loss. Or perhaps the life of a DJ really is nothing more than sitting at at turntable mixing songs and watching the dancers. Judging by DJ Hero 2, that’s a pretty fun way to live.
