Hey gamers


I'll be posting reviews of the Guitar Hero / Rock Band games I've played recently. I'll kick it off with my least favourite of the PS3 era: Band Hero.


There's nothing that this game does that's offensively terrible; well, maybe apart from the bizarre lyric censoring, but it's just the most generic game in the series for me. The game is focused on a more pop-centric setlist, and this is a move I'm not a fan of at all. Besides that, and besides the celebrity appearances, there's nothing that sets Band Hero apart from the rest of the series, especially GH5.


The setlist is really the only thing worth talking about here. Since it's a pop setlist, I find that the overwhelming majority of these songs fall into two categories. The first are songs that are boring to play. Many of these tracks follow the generic pop song structure and/or are one-and-done FCs at my skill level. As a result, they just blend together and left little to no impact on me. The second are songs that have no business being in a Guitar Hero game, whether I like them on their own or not. I don't know who made these selections, but Band Hero has tracks like Wannabe - Spice Girls, Rock Star - N.E.R.D., Happy Together - The Turtles, Y.M.C.A. - Village People, I Heard It Through The Grapevine - Marvin Gaye, American Pie - Don McLean, etc. These songs feel like they don't belong in this type of rhythm game and have strange charts to play.


I'm not a fan of this game. I'll pop it in my PS3 every so often to play the handful of fun songs, but the style of the setlist and the lack of change/innovation on any of the rest of its systems make Band Hero one of the worst in the series for me.


Favourite songs:

- Black Cat - Janet Jackson
- Fascination - Alphabeat
- I Want You to Want Me (Live) - Cheap Trick
- If You Could Only See - Tonic
- Kids - Robbie Williams & Kylie Minogue
- Love Is a Battlefield - Pat Benatar
- Naïve - The Kooks
- Take a Picture - Filter
- You Belong with Me - Taylor Swift

Played this with 2 of my friends when I was a kid and we didn't care about the soundtrack, because we were able to play Mr Roboto by Styx in a video game with a fucking GUITAR, DRUMSET, AND MICROPHONE!! There was also a 4-player gamemode where you could connect 2 DS's to the wii and have the 2 wii players compete for score in a song, while the DS players would be each player's roadie and sabotage/help the wii players by setting their fretboard on fire, or making the notes turn invisible, or reversing their left and rights, and stuff like that.

I think this game is funny because they yassified guitar hero and made something to compete with lego rock band of all things. This game's existence is weird to me because they clearly saw that a lot of kids were playing guitar hero, and chose to target that demographic when the regular guitar hero games were already perfectly E-rated. I guess they wanted to appease super protective parents that didn't want to see their kids play metallica or something. Since this game is more for kids, the setlist has a lot more pop music than your ordinary guitar hero, yet I didn't know quite a lot of songs in the setlist now and certainly wouldn't have as a kid, so that's a bit strange. The game makes a big deal about how they got taylor swift, no doubt, and the maroon 5 singer in as guest characters, so they likely blew most of their budget on that ngl. Even though the setlist has some bangers in it, the beatmaps are boringly easy. If you are a serious guitar hero player, this won't do anything to satiate you. If you HAVE to play a "family friendly" guitar hero, play lego rock band instead.

Band Hero just continues the downward spiral caused by World Tour, it is the pinnacle of the one thing that i believe was primarily responsible for the death of "Hero" games in general, lack of vision.

Band Hero is another game that doesn't know what it wants to be, a title that exists exclusively to chase trends as a pale imitation of Rock Band. The songs aren't made with all four instruments in mind, least of all guitar, so playing most of the songs with anything but vocals just leads you to repeating the same notes over and over, if you have any notes at all. I only got the chance to guitar and bass but i wasn't exactly left wanting more. This games failures are almost entirely due to the track listing, but it would still be a pretty uninspired game otherwise.

What's funny about this is that Activision cancelled the actual "Sing Hero", but this game is pretty much made to be a purely singing game, and thus should have been called Sing Hero. This was the only one of these games where i actually went through the trouble of plugging in a mic just to sing "Lips of An Angel".

Band Hero doesn't really have much of a reason to exist, unless you REALLY like the soundtrack you're better off playing Rock Band for basically any of it's vastly improved features.