Reviews » Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s [PS2]
Reviewed by inpheaux
I love Guitar Hero. A lot. As such, when Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s was officially announced after years of rumor, I knew I'd be buying it. Even if I was only buying it as a quick fix to tide me over until the imminent releases of Rock Band and Guitar Hero 3, I'd be buying it. It's Guitar Hero. It's being developed by Harmonix. How could it go wrong?
When the videos of epic Guitar Hero "Sluggo" playing through many of the new tracks on expert were released, I started getting concerned. Many of them looked just too hard. Guitar Hero is a weird game when it comes to difficulty. If you make it too easy the game doesn't feel as rewarding as it could. If you make it too hard the game abruptly stops being fun. If you don't rank songs by difficulty order the game stops feeling fair, and players feel robbed of getting the full game experience. Somehow, after doing so well with Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2, Harmonix managed to do all three of these things in the same game.
Before diving into why I feel slightly betrayed by Harmonix, let's cover what exactly you get with the game. Take the GH2 engine. Re-skin six of the characters and all but the last venue to give them a new discintly-80s feel. Add 29 songs from the 80s (and one song that wishes it was from the 80s), including 5 recordings from the original artists. Unfortunately, that's it. No unlockable songs, just guitars, finishes, and the Grim Ripper. No new venues, no new characters, no new multiplayer options, not even the same number of main tracks as GH2. Then set an MSRP of $50.
For the most part, the game really isn't that bad. The song selections are good, the covers are mostly good, and the new loading quips, re-skins of the characters and venues give the game a great 80s atmosphere. The engine is also the perfect GH2 engine many of us have grown to love. Yet, despite this seemingly hard to screw up lineup, Harmonix managed to do so by way of difficulty.
So, Problem #1: Easy, Medium, Hard, and even some tracks from Expert are too easy. I beat Hard mode in two sittings, and only because I had a class to attend in the middle. I 5-starred most Hard songs on my first try, save for some needlessly hard tracks like What I Like About You and Caught in a Mosh. Only a few songs required multiple tries to pass, like the final track Play With Me. Up on expert, I can 5 or 4-star most of the first four tiers. Back down on Medium I've gotten nothing but Full-Completes on the few songs I've suffered through. Now, I consider myself to be pretty good at Guitar Hero, but I don't feel I'm so good that this perceived ease is just me being good. I think the majority of the songs really are easier than Guitar Hero or Guitar Hero 2. But, of course, not all of them.
As I mentioned, some songs in GH 80s are just plain mean. It's like after they broke the three-note-chord ice in GH2, someone must have told Harmonix "GOSH YOU GUYS, THERE WEREN'T ANYWHERE NEAR ENOUGH THREE-NOTE-CHORDS! ARE YOU GUYS HOLDING OUT ON US OR SOMETHING?" I would like to injure this person. A lot. In Expert Mode, damn near every song features three-note chords or the dreaded Green/Orange chord. And it isn't like the three-note-chords from GH2, where maybe you get one or two per song like in Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart, in GH 80s, three-note-chords are the basis of a song. The entire verse portion of Heat of the Moment is all three-note-chords, and they're not simple transitions, things like fast transitions from R/B/O -> G/R/Y. And then there's What I Like About You, which I can somehow pass, but can't exactly tell you how. It's almost all transitioning back and forth between Y/B/O and just Y, and other similar chord pairs (like G/R/Y & G). It's awful. And that's a track I consider to still be doable. Up near the top end of the game you have things like Caught in a Mosh which I can only compare to being worse than Cowboys From Hell. I can generally take a game being hard, but the way they've chosen to make things hard in GH 80s just seems excessive and mean.
The really really hard stuff comes late in the game, as it should, but Harmonix put some songs way out of order in GH 80s. The best example of this is the chronologically out-of-place Because, It's Midnite from Homestar Runner fake-80s-band "Limozeen". It's placed as the tier 2 encore, which on Expert difficulty is required to move on to tier 3, and it is the worst Guitar Hero song ever. It's a decent easy song… and then you hit the solo, which is a wall of notes worse than anything in any other track to date. Worse than Jordan. And it's not like Woman from Guitar Hero 2, where it's hard but not impossible to limp through because it's early. No, this is a song which us mere mortals will be forced to fail at 56% forever, and because of that, we won't be allowed to progress through Expert Career Mode.
The final failing of GH 80s is the price point. The game just isn't worth $50. GH2 was worth $50. It had more than double the tracks that 80s does, and all the features like training mode, coop, and so on were all actually new. Even at the reduced price Best Buy is selling it for of $40 seems a bit high. If you count the gift card you can get from ordering it online from Best Buy it comes down to $25, but even that seems a bit high. The game is worth $20-30, tops. As it's priced now, I can only recommend it to absolute die-hard Guitar Hero fans. If you haven't 5-starred all of Guitar Hero 2 on Expert yet, or aren't totally nuts about 80s music, steer clear of this one until the price drops a bit.
Overall, it isn't a completely unredeemable game. On Expert, I Ran and Turning Japanese are two of my favourite Guitar Hero songs to date. But I just can't ignore its failings. What's worse is that now I'm scared of how Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band are going to turn out later this year. With 80s we've now seen how a Guitar Hero game can go wrong even if you have a solid engine to build it on, and with Guitar Hero 3 the crew over at Neversoft had to build their engine from scratch. With Rock Band, I'm now scared that Harmonix doesn't know how to make things enjoyably difficult anymore. But I'm going to try to stay positive, and hope both of those will turn out great.
Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s - PS2
Presentation
It's Guitar Hero 2 re-skinned. Seriously. That's about it.
Gameplay
Again, Guitar Hero 2. You've played it, right? It's the same engine, just with new songs. Oh, and it's ridiculously, unplayably, and unfairly hard on Expert now.
Replayability
Though it's Guitar Hero, and Guitar Hero naturally lends itself to a lot of replayability, this installment has the least amount of content to date. Less content, less replaybility. It also has the highest number of songs I never want to play ever again, like What I Like About You.
Value
$50 for 30 songs just doesn't cut it. If you really want it, get it for $25 from Best Buy, or just wait until you can get it used.
Overall
It's Guitar Hero, but it's the worst one to date. It's still enjoyable, but nowhere near as enjoyable as either of its predecessors. Unless you're going through new-content withdrawal and just can't wait until Guitar Hero 3 or Rock Band, you might want to sit this one out.
