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Reviews » Guitar Hero 2 [PS2]

Guitar Hero 2 is one of those rare games that comes along and manages to not only be just as good as its predecessor, but actually be better in every way imaginable. It looks better. It plays better. It has a better variety of music. It has more modes. It has coop. It solves the few tiny miniscule problems people could possibly find with the original. It does everything. Sure, there are a few ways the game could be made even better, but most of them aren’t feasible on the PS2, so really, this is about as close to perfect as we’ll get for the moment. So enjoy it.

Guitar Hero 2, as it should be expected, is the follow-up to last year’s smash hit Guitar Hero. The core aspects of the game that made it so wonderful remain unchanged. If you somehow missed Guitar Hero, here’s the deal. You pick a song, and use the included guitar-shaped controller to play along by pressing fret buttons and strumming along. Difficulty scales by having notes on the screen come faster, making you do chords, and more or less just making the notes closer resemble how the notes would be in the actual song. Throughout the song there are star notes which build up your star power, which in-turn can be unleashed to start a bonus modifier period that can save your ass. At the end, you’ll either screw up so much that the crowd boos you off the stage before finishing, or you’ll pass the song and get a score, along with some cash to spend in the unlock shop.

All of this stuff has remained the same. As it should, really. Harmonix and RedOctane really nailed the whole experience last time, from art direction to song selection to difficulty, and so on. GH2 brings to the table a couple new very welcome adjustments, so let’s start running down the big ones. The first should go without saying: an all new expanded soundtrack. GH2 has 40 licensed tracks that make up the main game, compared to GH1’s 30. This translates to two extra sets to play through before beating each difficulty. Next change might not sound massive but I swear it is. They changed the Hammer-On/Pull-Off system so that you don’t have to hold down fret buttons in preparation for a HO/PO, and increased the target window in which you can press the fret buttons to nail a HO/PO. What this means is that when you see a line of notes in rapid succession that have completely white tops, you can strum the first one and slide your finger across the fret buttons to nail what looks like an incredibly complex sequence without having to strum at all. It’s sorta tough to explain, but when you nail a 10+ note run in the middle of a solo one-handed while throwing up horns with the other, you will feel like a complete bad-ass, despite the fact that you’re wailing on a piece of plastic. But it will be ok, because you are a bad-ass.

To solve some of the more common complaints with GH1, Harmonix & friends added two new multiplayer modes in GH2. The mode you’ll probably be spending more time in (because it is totally awesome) is Co-op. After you pick your song, you’ll each be given a chance to pick which position you want to play. In addition to the lead guitar track that every song has, GH2 also has either the bass line or rhythm guitar track. In addition to picking that, you still get to pick what difficulty you want. So if you’re a super #1 certified guitar hero expert, you can pick lead guitar on expert difficulty, and if your friend thinks you’re weird for caring so much about video games, but still wants to play, they can pick the bass line on easy. To add another little wrinkle to Co-op, star power requires cooperation. Hitting starred notes goes into a single pool of star power, and when you want to use it you both have to tilt up your guitars simultaneously. (Screaming your band name in unison at this point is optional, but suggested.)

The other new multiplayer mode in addition to the original GH trade-off licks mode is Pro Face-off. Pro Face-off is unlocked by beating any mode above easy, and in it you have two players playing the full song. This mode was put in mostly to eliminate the potential argument of “WAH! YOU ONLY WON BECAUSE I WAS STUCK WITH THE HARD PART!” Now you both get the hard part, so stop whining.

The last major addition was another thing many peoples’ wish-lists: Practice Mode. Now you can fire up any song you’ve unlocked anywhere in the game in practice mode and play a loop of the whole song or any section of the song (Solo A, Chorus B, Outro, etc). You can chose to practice it on any difficulty as soon as you unlock it somewhere, and can slow it down with three levels of slowness. The rest of the track doesn’t get slowed down when you change speed, so you don’t have to hear distorted vocals, it’s just you and a drum machine. Unfortunately, I’ve found Practice Mode isn’t the panacea I thought it would be. Slowing the game down just isn’t as useful as you’d think it would be.

The other changes are just little bonuses thrown in, like how the track list now shows if you’ve not only 5-starred but scored 100% on a song, by having the normally black stars in gold. Also, once you’ve completed a song, there’s a “More Stats” option, that’ll give you a readout of how you fared in each named section of the song, plus extra stuff like total notes hit, average multiplier, and other errata. The fifth song in every set is also now considered the encore, and is not unlocked until you’ve met the requirement to proceed to the next set. At the end of that last song needed to pass, you’ll be told that the crowd is loving it and is begging for an encore. If you choose to play it, you’ll launch directly into the new song, the set will transform in some ridiculously awesome way, and the crowd will – understandably – go nuts. They also added stuff to make the game even harder, like three-button chords (including ones with a split, like R+BO or RY+O) and the DEADLY G+O chord. My tiny girl-like hands were made for gaming, and they’re generally nimble enough for most of GH2, but they just aren’t capable of easily transitioning into a G+O chord. Also, if you’re the kind of guy who likes customizing things, there’s a ton of new guitar bodies, and three new characters to play as, each with their own set of moves. In addition to characters, there are also extra outfits to buy for certain characters. They also retooled some of the characters returning from GH1. Clive Winston looks like he’d fit better in a Skynyrd cover band now, and Xavier Stone looks like he just escaped from another Shaft remake.

Despite all this wonderful new stuff, I was able to muster up some complaints. Problem 1: The game ate my save. I had 5-starred all of Easy, all of Medium, most of Hard, and was just starting Expert. I booted the game up and whoops, corrupt savegame. I sucked it up, named my new band “CORRUPTED SAVE” and went back to rocking. A day later, I heard from my good e-friend Ping that the same thing happened to him. I hit up the internets and found several other reports of the same thing happening. I have an official Sony PS2 memcard, it’s the same memcard I’ve had since I bought my Slim PS2 when it was first released. I also used to have a normal fat PS2 which I bought at launch those many years ago. I have never had a corrupt save. I did nothing to provoke this, these are not isolated events. For a game like GH2, a game where it’s all about progress and maintaining high scores and unlocking stuff, to have massive data-loss bugs at release is just mean. I was able to get over It pretty quickly, but this is something that could easily cause some massive nerd rage.

Problem 2: Some of the songs feel seriously out of order. Wolfmother’s Woman is not a first-tier song. I don’t care what you say. It just isn’t. The Sword’s Freya comes way too early in the game (and in general is just not fun). Almost every set has at least one disproportionately hard song, and this can get very frustrating. Personally, I’m stuck on Set 6 of Expert Mode because Rock This Town by the Stray Cats is horrible and needs to die in a fire. And I’m sure that as soon as I pass that, I’ll be stuck on Set 7 thanks to Psychobilly Freakout.

Problem 3: . . well, ok, maybe it’s not really a problem, but a preference thing. The mix of music isn’t as good as Guitar Hero’s. It’s good, mind you, and the mix is more balanced now as far as eras of music and genres of rock that are featured, but there are more than a couple songs that I just plain don’t like.

These problems, though, really shouldn’t be things that deter you from buying the game, they’re more so just things to know and expect ahead of time. The game is still wonderful, far better than expected, even better than I expected after I played the game at E3 and played both demos. It easily has Game of the Year potential, and despite tough competition in its genre thanks to games like Elite Beat Agents, it should easily be the best Music Game of the year. As with its predecessor, even if you aren’t a fan of music games, or even games in general, if you have access to a PS2 you should at least try Guitar Hero 2. It is totally worth it.

Guitar Hero 2 - PS2

Presentation

It either looks the same as Guitar Hero or better. How the game looks really isn’t important, but it’s still great.

Gameplay

Improved and expanded upon. More than you’d expect, in a genre where changes between versions is frequently little more than a new set list.

Replayability

It’s the focus of the game, and it’s wonderful. You’ll be playing these songs over and over, and they never get old. Except Freya.

Value

It’s more expensive than a normal game, but that’s because it comes with a Guitar. And you need that Guitar. If you’ve already got a controller (or a few), you can save some cash by buying the $50 game-only version. But hell, this is seriously one of those games where you need to look past the cost.

Overall

Guitar Hero was already one of my favourite games of all-time. Guitar Hero 2 is better in almost every way I can think of. You need this game now.