My initial excitement for this version of the game began to wear away throughout the story mode, and hit an all-time low in the final 2 chapters.
While the story has some fun twists and turns, it's padded to hell and back and often has extreme periods of inactivity just for the sake of inflating the chapter count artificially to 10, and the runtime to around 10 hours. It could really be said and done in around 2, especially when the track selection loops about a third of the way through the campaign (there's songs in the main mode that don't get used, adding those into the mix at least would've helped somewhat).
Difficulty is all over the place. While it's a rhythm game with different difficulties which is perfect for the learning curve playing in Free Play provides, the story mode spends about half of the runtime on the easiest of Normal mode charts before mismashing in Hard, Super Hard and Crazy charts before just dropping the facade entirely and hitting you with the most insane charts in the game for the last 2 chapters, BUT THEN every now and then after a bad one sprinkling in Hard's easiest charts as an apology. The balance is all over the place and I resorted to using the game's item system after a while to automatically pass stages.
On top of this, it's clear some of the charts were not properly tested for touch screen controls (seems to mostly share charts with the console version, but the control schemes on offer there make hitting the notes way more managable). While not impossible, some are pretty unfair given the hand movements you're expected to do to hit them. It's just way too unfair of a spike in what was such a boringly easy game only a few hours before. It feels like another move to artifically pad the runtime even more, something the game would've done perfectly fine without.
Combine the tedium of the story padding and the pain from the balancing and you're left with a game that despite having an exclusive story mode and being nearly on par with the console release... you should probably avoid in most circumstances in favour of the console version instead.
While the story has some fun twists and turns, it's padded to hell and back and often has extreme periods of inactivity just for the sake of inflating the chapter count artificially to 10, and the runtime to around 10 hours. It could really be said and done in around 2, especially when the track selection loops about a third of the way through the campaign (there's songs in the main mode that don't get used, adding those into the mix at least would've helped somewhat).
Difficulty is all over the place. While it's a rhythm game with different difficulties which is perfect for the learning curve playing in Free Play provides, the story mode spends about half of the runtime on the easiest of Normal mode charts before mismashing in Hard, Super Hard and Crazy charts before just dropping the facade entirely and hitting you with the most insane charts in the game for the last 2 chapters, BUT THEN every now and then after a bad one sprinkling in Hard's easiest charts as an apology. The balance is all over the place and I resorted to using the game's item system after a while to automatically pass stages.
On top of this, it's clear some of the charts were not properly tested for touch screen controls (seems to mostly share charts with the console version, but the control schemes on offer there make hitting the notes way more managable). While not impossible, some are pretty unfair given the hand movements you're expected to do to hit them. It's just way too unfair of a spike in what was such a boringly easy game only a few hours before. It feels like another move to artifically pad the runtime even more, something the game would've done perfectly fine without.
Combine the tedium of the story padding and the pain from the balancing and you're left with a game that despite having an exclusive story mode and being nearly on par with the console release... you should probably avoid in most circumstances in favour of the console version instead.