Recently I had the opportunity to check out Activision’s two upcoming music hero games, DJ Hero 2 and Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock. While neither redefines the rhythm game genre, both are fun.
DJ Hero 2 proves that Activision hasn’t given up on the DJ Hero franchise in spite of the first game’s reportedly disappointing sales. When I arrived at the demo, the PR folks were going all out, with two of them playing the game’s plastic turntables while another sang Karaoke Revolution style.
Outside of the addition of microphone support for singers, the gameplay mechanics are quite similar to the original. Two songs are mixed together, and the player’s goal is to follow onscreen prompts indicating when to press buttons, turn dials and spin the turntable. A nice addition is that at certain points in the song you can go into a free mixing mode where you can switch back and forth between the two songs as you like; I don’t know how that’s scored, but it was something I wished for in the first game.
DJ Hero 2 has also added more multiplayer modes. The one demoed was a DJ battle mode in which players trade off, which felt kind of exciting to watch. Multiplayer is definitely being emphasized this time; you can buy the game in a “party bundle” that includes 2 turntables and a microphone (and yes, whenever anyone says that you will get the Beck song stuck in your head).
I played a little of the game in party mode (where you can drop in and out as you like and playing badly won’t stop the song) and found it as fun as ever. I’m looking forward to a few DJ battles when the game comes out this October.
Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock tries to answer the question, “why does the world need yet another Guitar Hero game?” by adding an odd mix of silly story and special powers. The story, narrated by Gene Simmons, involves building an army by playing as a variety of rocker types who, once they’ve beaten enough songs, will transform into rock warriors. The game has a cheesy heavy metal fantasy quality to it that just reminds you of how easy it is to make fun of heavy metal culture.
Each musician has special powers that allow him or her to rack up points. The PR flack seemed very excited by the way these powers could be used to get higher scores than ever before, but to me this seemed like the famous scene in Spinal Tap where the guy says his amplifier goes up to 11. The fact that you can get a higher score in this game seems more like painting “11” on the volume knob than like a game changer.
Activision has also come up with a new guitar design in which the wings of the guitar are removable and can be replaced with other wings to create different looks for your guitar. This is cute, although completely irrelevant to gameplay.
The music looks to be the usual mix of bands I like (Queen, Rolling Stones, Buzzcocks) and bands I could do without (Megadeth, Kiss). The PR guys said the game is focused strongly on guitar-centric material, but this is still a band game that supports drums and vocals.
Warriors looks to be fairly enjoyable, and if I don’t have the lag problems that have plagued my experiences with previous Guitar Hero games on the Wii then I expect to have fun playing it, as well as snickering at the lame story, when the game arrives this fall.
