This is a good Games for Music Mania. When we first got our hands on a preview build of Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s, we found the single-player experience to be much the same as the previous two installments in the hit rhythm series. We've now had some extra time to check out the multiplayer side of the game, and we can report that--much like single-player--things haven't changed that much at all. Not that that's a bad thing--more Guitar Hero, particularly with the kitsch songs this game focuses on, is always rocking.
The three multiplayer modes we’ve come to know and love are all still here--cooperative, face-off and pro face-off. Cooperative play sees you sharing a track between two players playing either lead, rhythm or bass, a feature first introduced in Guitar Hero II. Face-off remains unchanged, and allows you to play alternating sections of notes of the same song. You can also pick two different player difficulties in case the person you’re playing with is still learning their way around the frets. Pro face-off is still limited to one difficulty for both players and represents the ultimate battle for rock supremacy.
Difficulty was one area that surprised us in Rocks the 80s, with even some tracks on Expert seeming a tad easy. We’re by no means the best Guitar Hero players around–-we’re certainly not the worst either--but we breezed through many of the tracks with the difficulty cranked to 11 and still managed to hit a high percentage of notes. As a point of reference, we scored five stars on coop Holy Diver on Expert during our first attempt. As we played an early preview build there’s probably some difficulty fine-tuning to go before release, so we’ll reserve our final judgment until the game goes gold.
Functionally, Rock the 80s plays identically to the other Guitar Hero titles, with the only exception being the inclusion of significantly more three chord note combinations. They’re tough to hit accurately, but anyone who has played Hard or Expert in GHII shouldn’t have any trouble nailing them with a bit of practice.
Our hands-on time allowed us to play most of the full track lineup for the expansion, and while we can’t tell you about the unannounced songs, we were impressed by the ones still to come. A couple of old favorites even surfaced amongst the classics. Despite the apparent easier difficulty compared to the finger breakers of Guitar Hero II, the tracks on 80s seem a lot more fun to play. Fingering can be intricate and at times a bit frantic-–but nailing the big solos makes you feel like you’re actually up there, chafing in your leather pants and leading the band.
