Battle of the Bands

Hot on the trails of the Rock band and Guitar Hero fad we get this interesting take on the music genre. It does a few things correctly but ultimately it's flaw shine through more than the good.

The game is visually bland. The character models kind of wiggle about on the screen and the graphics just look very dated. Almost like a launch GCN little. The locations get old after a while as they are constantly repeated and with only 6 or so music groups it gets just boring all together.

As with any music game we need good music and if you're someone who grew up in the 90's then this soundtrack should be awesome to you. We have some Sound Garden, some good rap tunes and a few others that i just can't remember. We have 30 songs ranging from a number of different genres and the idea of the genre is very heavy for the actual game play as well.

The basic idea is that you're a band of a specific genre and you're trying to abttle it out with other genre bands. So the game play is geared around this. You need to hit notes either center, left or right and every combo you can hit a note for an attack. Each attack varies on how many notes you need to hit.

The AI can do the same to you but you both can block each other attacks by hitting the B button. Learn this early because later on it gets harder to try and get use to the time delay.

That's the games biggest problem though. There is a slight time delay in your movements to what is happening on screen. The Wiimote also isn't too responsive with it. The idea is to jut it forward for a center note or left or right for those notes. In theory this should be fun and fast but it's rather slow at times and a lot of the time it would go in the opposite direction of where I was swinging.

Besides that major annoyance I could see the game being fun. Every three hits a person makes it changes to their genre. Sadly this reflects nothing on the actual game as the winner is decided by the amount of points. It's always promising when you score 10,000 more points than the AI and your whole total is a whole 17,000. Then there are certain songs where the notes just wouldn't hit for me and I'd win by a little less.

The game has some multi-player but no wifi action. It's a fairly short title and with no downloadable content it will grow old really fast. The Wii controls really hurt the game also and make it so that it just isn't very fun to play. The music is good and I love the crazy genre changes to songs but in the end it just falls apart due to the controls.

Story - 1/10
Graphics - 4/10
Sound - 9/10
Control - 4/10
Game Play - 7/10
Replay Value - 3/10

Final Score - 5/10