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IGN Review of Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades
It's only been about four months since Red Octane, Activision, and Vicarious Visions released the excellent Guitar Hero On Tour for the Nintendo DS. There's not a whole lot a team can do on the handheld in that short amount of time, so it's pretty obvious that Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades isn't going to be much more than a new track list of songs within the same rhythm engine. And beyond a few tweaks and a handful of changes like new characters and background venues, that's exactly what Decades is. If you didn't get into it the first time this update isn't going to change your mind, but for those who loved rocking out on the handheld in the original game, here are more than two dozen new full-length songs spanning four decades of rock music.
Everything I said about Guitar Hero On Tour last July can apply to Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades: the console guitar rhythm game works extremely well on the handheld thanks to the ingenious Guitar Grip peripheral, a device that plugs into the Game Boy slot of the Nintendo DS and replicates the fret bar of the full-size console Guitar Hero guitar peripheral. As the song plays, notes stream down the screen to indicate which buttons to press while strumming the touch-screen at the same time. While it doesn't feel like you're playing a guitar on the Nintendo DS, it definitely feels like you're playing Guitar Hero, and that's the point of the product: to give players a way to play Guitar Hero on the go.
Admittedly, Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades was pushed out the door as quickly as possible to ride the Guitar Hero popularity wave -- the original Nintendo DS title has turned into one of the top third-party games released on the handheld, so obviously Activision wants to keep that gravy train chugging along. To get the game out in a speedy development cycle the original engine's been recycled, so you get the same good sound quality and excellent touch-screen response. But you also still get the awkwardness of the band members not really moving to the beat of the song they're playing. It's a small gripe considering your eyes are pretty much focused on the note highway streaming down on top of the visuals.
The majority of the change is in the song list and the venues that surround them. Decades is segmented into four decades of music: 2000s, 1990s, 1980s, and 1970s; Activision wanted to get in some contemporary music so it opens with a "Modern" venue but it's stupid to consider that its own "decade." Each venue has four songs and an unlockable fifth "encore" track, just like the original Guitar Hero On Tour game. The song line-up in a rhythm/music game is a completely subjective thing: one man's trash is another man's treasure, right? In my opinion, the game's tracklist starts out bad but starts getting more enjoyable as you unlock the earlier decades, but that might just be my tastes in classic rock sneaking in there.
Click here for the full list of songs in Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades.
The focus on era of music plays against the Guitar Hero difficulty design, and it's probably my biggest complaint of Guitar Hero On Tour Decades: in previous Guitar Hero games, the setlist gets harder the deeper you get. But because the game focuses on dishing out songs from a specific era five at a time, it's almost impossible to stick to that rising difficulty curve of past Guitar Hero games. The songs get progressively difficult within their decades, but once you move on to the next you'll find the first song of the next decade to be significantly less difficult than the final song of the just completed one.
Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades does tweak the previous game with obvious improvements: if you play through a song on the Hard difficulty, you earn credit for the Easy and Medium difficulties, too -- no need to play through each song on the simpler settings. There are also three unlockable songs this time, available when you beat the three different modes in Decades: Lead Guitar, Bass/Rhythm Guitar, and Guitar Duel.
Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades "unlocks" a dormant feature within the original Guitar Hero On Tour DS game: both versions (and, ultimately, future versions) of the DS Guitar Hero On Tour will seamlessly link in wireless play and stream each other's track list in cooperative and competitive two player mode. It's an awesome feature that makes it well worth purchasing the full version of Decades with a Guitar Grip peripheral. You can simply keep the second one handy for on-the-fly multiplayer with a DS owner who might not own a copy of the game.
©2008-11-17, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Everything I said about Guitar Hero On Tour last July can apply to Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades: the console guitar rhythm game works extremely well on the handheld thanks to the ingenious Guitar Grip peripheral, a device that plugs into the Game Boy slot of the Nintendo DS and replicates the fret bar of the full-size console Guitar Hero guitar peripheral. As the song plays, notes stream down the screen to indicate which buttons to press while strumming the touch-screen at the same time. While it doesn't feel like you're playing a guitar on the Nintendo DS, it definitely feels like you're playing Guitar Hero, and that's the point of the product: to give players a way to play Guitar Hero on the go.
Admittedly, Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades was pushed out the door as quickly as possible to ride the Guitar Hero popularity wave -- the original Nintendo DS title has turned into one of the top third-party games released on the handheld, so obviously Activision wants to keep that gravy train chugging along. To get the game out in a speedy development cycle the original engine's been recycled, so you get the same good sound quality and excellent touch-screen response. But you also still get the awkwardness of the band members not really moving to the beat of the song they're playing. It's a small gripe considering your eyes are pretty much focused on the note highway streaming down on top of the visuals.
The majority of the change is in the song list and the venues that surround them. Decades is segmented into four decades of music: 2000s, 1990s, 1980s, and 1970s; Activision wanted to get in some contemporary music so it opens with a "Modern" venue but it's stupid to consider that its own "decade." Each venue has four songs and an unlockable fifth "encore" track, just like the original Guitar Hero On Tour game. The song line-up in a rhythm/music game is a completely subjective thing: one man's trash is another man's treasure, right? In my opinion, the game's tracklist starts out bad but starts getting more enjoyable as you unlock the earlier decades, but that might just be my tastes in classic rock sneaking in there.
Click here for the full list of songs in Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades.
The focus on era of music plays against the Guitar Hero difficulty design, and it's probably my biggest complaint of Guitar Hero On Tour Decades: in previous Guitar Hero games, the setlist gets harder the deeper you get. But because the game focuses on dishing out songs from a specific era five at a time, it's almost impossible to stick to that rising difficulty curve of past Guitar Hero games. The songs get progressively difficult within their decades, but once you move on to the next you'll find the first song of the next decade to be significantly less difficult than the final song of the just completed one.
Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades does tweak the previous game with obvious improvements: if you play through a song on the Hard difficulty, you earn credit for the Easy and Medium difficulties, too -- no need to play through each song on the simpler settings. There are also three unlockable songs this time, available when you beat the three different modes in Decades: Lead Guitar, Bass/Rhythm Guitar, and Guitar Duel.
Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades "unlocks" a dormant feature within the original Guitar Hero On Tour DS game: both versions (and, ultimately, future versions) of the DS Guitar Hero On Tour will seamlessly link in wireless play and stream each other's track list in cooperative and competitive two player mode. It's an awesome feature that makes it well worth purchasing the full version of Decades with a Guitar Grip peripheral. You can simply keep the second one handy for on-the-fly multiplayer with a DS owner who might not own a copy of the game.
©2008-11-17, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved