Guitar Hero Encore: Flops the 80s
Harmonix's last Guitar Hero game simply reeks of a phoned-in effort and is hardly worth the price of an expansion, let alone a full game.
Published: August 13, 2007
There were a couple different scenarios that went through my head as I tore through Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s. In one of them, series creators Harmonix Music Systems had already moved on to their next project, the insanely awesome and ambitious Rock Band and they had completely checked out of development. In another, Activision, fresh off their acquisition of original Guitar Hero publisher RedOctane, and seeing the success of Guitar Hero II, slipped into their familiar role of milking a franchise for all its worth and quickly started pressuring Harmonix to create an expansion pack that they would apparently sell at full price. It's likely that both were partly the cause, but the end result is a game that absolutely craps on the people that made it such a success in the first place.
There's no way to ignore the fact that this is an expansion pack; re-skinning the familiar characters and the venues, providing unbalanced, lackluster patterns for the songs themselves, neglecting to build up the songs across the various difficulties into something that feels like it's ratcheting up, and going with a track list that is maybe 10% great songs, with the vast majority being busy work and some ending up being complete stinkers all would be acceptable if the game were, say, $20. Everyone knows Harmonix is done with the series they created, and their effort in this game makes that blatantly obvious. Instead, Activision is charging fifty dollars for the whole mess.
You can't know how bad that makes me feel. Some poor, clueless schlub that heard how much fun people were having with the first two games or may have been told there was a sequel coming (and that is actually quite good, so anti-Neversoft folks put down your pitchforks), then plunked down the full price to play this pile is going to feel ripped off -- or at the very least isn't going to fully understand what makes the series so great. It wasn't just the songs, it was playing new venues, enjoying the progression through the relatively smooth skill increase. It was hitting the wall on a harder difficulty, going back through to the end on an easier one and then coming back to that wall and busting right through it like it was nothing.
These are the things that are lost as Guitar Hero Encore raced through development.
Is there even a need to ladle more crap on top of the heap here when discussing the visuals and audio like we normally do in reviews? Can you stomach paying full price for the same venues, characters and guitars, some of which were hardly touched up to look "80s" enough to fit the bill? Would you like to hear some merely passable covers that are horribly uninteresting to play? Need I go on?
Look, there's just no need to drag this out any longer than I already have. Do not buy into the idea that a game is priced a good forty dollars more than it should be is worth it just because of the Guitar Hero name -- hell, the audacity of Activision in pricing the game $10 than most PlayStation 2 games these days is even more deplorable. You might not feel ripped off if you rent this one, but for the love of god, don't spend more than a couple bucks to blow through the game just to see how far the series really has fallen in this generation.
There's no way to ignore the fact that this is an expansion pack; re-skinning the familiar characters and the venues, providing unbalanced, lackluster patterns for the songs themselves, neglecting to build up the songs across the various difficulties into something that feels like it's ratcheting up, and going with a track list that is maybe 10% great songs, with the vast majority being busy work and some ending up being complete stinkers all would be acceptable if the game were, say, $20. Everyone knows Harmonix is done with the series they created, and their effort in this game makes that blatantly obvious. Instead, Activision is charging fifty dollars for the whole mess.
You can't know how bad that makes me feel. Some poor, clueless schlub that heard how much fun people were having with the first two games or may have been told there was a sequel coming (and that is actually quite good, so anti-Neversoft folks put down your pitchforks), then plunked down the full price to play this pile is going to feel ripped off -- or at the very least isn't going to fully understand what makes the series so great. It wasn't just the songs, it was playing new venues, enjoying the progression through the relatively smooth skill increase. It was hitting the wall on a harder difficulty, going back through to the end on an easier one and then coming back to that wall and busting right through it like it was nothing.
These are the things that are lost as Guitar Hero Encore raced through development.
Is there even a need to ladle more crap on top of the heap here when discussing the visuals and audio like we normally do in reviews? Can you stomach paying full price for the same venues, characters and guitars, some of which were hardly touched up to look "80s" enough to fit the bill? Would you like to hear some merely passable covers that are horribly uninteresting to play? Need I go on?
Look, there's just no need to drag this out any longer than I already have. Do not buy into the idea that a game is priced a good forty dollars more than it should be is worth it just because of the Guitar Hero name -- hell, the audacity of Activision in pricing the game $10 than most PlayStation 2 games these days is even more deplorable. You might not feel ripped off if you rent this one, but for the love of god, don't spend more than a couple bucks to blow through the game just to see how far the series really has fallen in this generation.
