Customer Reviews

Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80's

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(34)
2 star:		(17)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

The Guitar Hero series has quickly become the premiere rhythm based gaming franchise, and with Activision now publishing the series, prepare for a yearly blitz of Guitar Hero games. Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80's, compiles thirty songs from said decade. Many bands and group from the era; ranging from hair metal smashes like Poison and Ratt to legendary metal pioneers Iron Maiden and Anthrax, are featured here, along with songs from Asia, Twisted Sister, the Dead Kennedys, and Skid Row to boot. While many of the songs are incredibly fun to play, Guitar Hero Encore suffers from the fact that there isn't anything here that you haven't seen before. Combine this with the fact that the game is selling for the full list price and only features thirty songs with basically nothing else new, and you get one disappointing overall package. There's no unlockable tracks either, and some of the featured songs (like cuts from White Lion and Faster Pussycat) could have been done without. All in all, Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80's isn't bad one bit and offers a decent amount of fun for veteran players of the series, but the game is a disappointing quick cash-in attempt that doesn't offer enough bang for your buck to warrant the price tag.

As a big Guitar Hero fan (I own the previous two installments) I was very excited that Red Octane was making an 80s version for us children of the 80s. Oddly enough, I didn't hear about it until literally the week before while doing some random research; it appeared as though Red Octane was barely advertising this and I think that was mistake no. 1.

Rock the 80s has a diverse track list that many a child of the 80s can enjoy. I personally enjoyed I Ran(So Far Away) by A Flock of Seagulls and Radar Love and my buddies got a kick out of Turning Japanese. However, that is where the fun ends. I bought it three hours ago and already I earned everything. As an encore I'm not surprised that Red Octane changed very little of the gameplay from Guitar Hero II but it seems as though they left out all the good stuff.

You can only purchase one additional character (Grim Reaper) so the other bonus characters are gone. This is sad as several of my buddies played exclusively as certain bonus characters. They also took out the bonus track section severely limiting songs. Red Octane barely edited the loading screen advice leaving most of the advice from Guitar Hero II on there.

On a few plus sides, I'm glad they kept co-op mode and many of the bonus guitars. I also wish they would've chosen better songs from certain groups (I think We're Not Gonna Take It would've been a better choice by Twisted Sister) but this is a criticism I have of the other Guitar Hero games.

Overall, I'm glad I waited in line to purchase Rock the 80s as I loved playing songs from my childhood but this could've been done a lot better with better bonus materials and less Guitar Hero II look-a-like but I should have expected as much when I saw "encore" under the title. An 85% overall with massive room for improvement.

Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks The 80s as a sequel to GH and GHII doesn't really measure up. It's still a fun game, mostly for people who grew up in the 80s like myself, but overall it really adds nothing new to the series. While GHII evolved the game quite a bit adding new multiplayer options and updating the hammer-on and pull-off functionality to make it more usable GH80s does nothing other than add a few new tunes to the mix. Barring a few tweaks the graphics are mostly the same throughout and the engine also remains the same. Apparently there are no plans to put this version of the game onto the XBOX 360.

Overall the songs are a lot easier to play through all difficulties with the exception of certain ones like Seventeen and Play With Me. For those who had a hard time progressing past the Medium difficulty this might be the right version of GH for you to break into Hard or even Expert. The songs themselves sound pretty decent overall and there are no glaringly bad vocal covers.

Songs by the original artists are:

"I Ran (So Far Away)" - A Flock of Seagulls
"Because, It's Midnite" - Limozeen
"The Warrior" - Scandal
"I Wanna Rock" - Twisted Sister
"Electric Eye" - Judas Priest

This will be the last GH game from Harmonix as they move on to do Rock Band. GHIII will be developed by Neversoft Entertainment.

If this game cost me $25, it would be the greatest game ever. I would love it for hours, I would master every single song on it, and I would be very, very happy.

It costs $50.

There are only 30 songs, no bonuses, no quirks, no unlockables to speak of. It's Guitar Hero 2 bonus tracks with a palette swap.

That being said, I really love the songs. I am a huge fan of 80s music, especially the ever present metal.

If they ever plan on doing something like this again, they need to do three things.

First off, they need to either reduce the price or put in more effort. $50 is a lot for a game, and if I pay it, I expect an actual game, not just an expansion pack.

Second, they need to do playtesting on it a lot more. No, I don't just mean put in more effort, I mean... it skips, it jumps, it's awful. Many songs are unplayable because of the skips.

Third, they need to do more than just make songs more difficult. This version is *much* harder than Guitar Hero 2, and to a certain extent, as someone who plays exclusively on expert, that's a good thing, but even though I would kill for an Yngwie Malmsteen track on one of them, I have to confess, enough is enough. If you play on expert, expect endless triple chords and transitions from the first song. If you play on easier difficulties, expect it to be so easy that you will scream.

The price of the game $40-50 is too high for only 30 songs. But had those 30 songs been real gems of the 80's I could have forgiven the price and reveled in my teen years.

However, despite a couple of good 80's songs, the most loved of all the 80's bands were completely ignored and left out! I understand they have to pay for rights to these songs, but with as many copies as they sell and as high as they are charging, they owe us some decent 80's music. This is not a tribute to the 80's, it's a desperate attempt to throw us some cheap music for high profits.

I was a teen in the 80's and listened to rock for 18 hours per day. I've never heard of many of the songs on the tracks. I've never heard of some of the bands on the list!
Where are Bryan Adams, Pat Benetar, Prince, ZZ-top, Van Halen, Run DMC, Wham, Duran Duran, Springsteen, Def Leppard, Dire Straits, Guns N' Roses, and 90 others I could list that top most of the artists on this edition.

A huge disappointment. I would pay 50 per month for a new version if they had decent music on it.

First off, I have to disagree w/the assessment by some that the negative reviews are a result of people not liking 80s music. I could not disagree more. I grew up in the 80s, and I think the track list is sketchy, at best. There are too many songs that I didn't even recognize (& I graduated HS in '91, so this isn't being written by someone who was born in the 80s, but who truly experienced that decade as a teenager). The worst part, imo, is the boss song, if you will. Extreme? Play With Me? There had to be a better song to pick than this, especially coming on the heels of Freebird as the finale of GHII.

Overall, it seems that the team behind this game simply mailed it in. There is no cohesion in the tracks (from the promising start of "Bang Your Head" right on to the Go Gos!?!?!?!), too many unrecognizable songs from a decade that had much more to chose from [no Dokken (heck, even Dream Warriors)? Dire Straits (Money for Nothing)? Even another Motley Crue track would have worked (Dr. Feelgood? Kickstart My Heart?)]. The point is these are songs from groups they could have gotten in the game (especially since MC was already in one of the previous games). The price point is also the breaking point, as this game costs as much (@ most retail outlets, anyway) as the other versions, yet contains fewer characters, fewer unlockables, and no songs available for purchase in the game.

Very disappointing, and once again, I grew up in this decade, so I know the songs of the era very well. Unfortunately, I don't even recognize some of the songs on the set list. If you can get it used, go for it. But for $50, no way.

If you loved the other Guitar Hero games and the song list doesn't make you gag the game is every bit as fun as the predecessors.

The problem is, as a full priced game I expected a bit more. There are only 30 songs, no bonus songs to unlock, fewer characters to chose from, no new outfits to unlock. The venues are only marginally different from those on Guitar Hero II, the same is true for the menus. If it had cost $20 less I would have no complaints, but as it is it's a bit disappointing.

Another disappointment: two of songs, Radar Love and Ballroom Blitz (80's covers of 70's songs...that alone seems like a bit of a cop out) sound nothing like their original (much better, and better known) versions. Just a warning if you were looking forward to rocking out to the versions you hear on the radio.

This game is not a disappointment like most reviewers would have you believe. Honestly, does anyone care what characters you play with or the guitar? Maybe a child would consider these things interesting, but as far as serious guitar hero players are concerned, it doesn't matter. The song selection could have been somewhat better, but it wasn't horrible. The covers, on the other hand, were horrible. If you are a medium/hard player, then this game should be fairly easy for you (except maybe the last set of songs, especially the final encore!). If you play this game on expert, there are certain songs that are a joke, but a definite challenge is presented in some songs. I haven't beat this game on expert yet as I have the other two, but i'm sure it will happen in the near future. Worth 50 bucks? Maybe not. If you are a serious guitar hero fan and don't care about different venues and such, then it is worth it to have new songs to be challenged on. These games are about gameplay and the challenge which this game is perfectly fine on.

Let me start by saying that I love Guitar Hero I and II and while you can argue for years about the song list for Encore: Rocks the 80's for me the disappointment comes in the execution. In the first two versions of Guitar Hero the production quality on the songs made you feel like you were playing with the real band at a big venue. With the new version, it sounds like your playing in someone's basement through a bad amp with a lead singer who has a cold. The other problem with the new version is the guitar work itself. With the previous versions the notes on the screen matched the song, in this new version there are many times where there seemed to be no connection between the music and the notes you were playing. This felt like Red Octane was in a hurry to get something out, grabbed some songs that would be cheap to license and then hired a second rate group to help them record the covers on bad equipment. I'm seriously considering sending my copy back to Red Octane.

What should have been a welcome expansion pack in the guise of an "encore" package, is instead a thinner version of GH with tighter controls and 30 new songs. The good news is the songs are a decent if somewhat B side representation of what the 80s was musically. When the Dead Kennedys share the same set list as Iron Maiden and Winger you know that an eclectic representation is what they had in mind. The guitar FX are crunchy and varied throughout the tracks and other than the songs sung by the original artists, the background band is weaker than in previous entries. The actual controls themselves feel slighty tweaked and shifting chords feels easier than in the other 2 as well. This should have retailed at a lower price considering the # of songs but as this will be one of the last GHs on PS2 its worth picking for the nostalgia and fun factor, if you can wait for the $ to drop the skimpy trimmings on offer will be easier to swallow. 5 to 10 more songs would have gone a LONG way here.