Guitar Hero Encore Review

Guitar Hero Encore Review: About the Game

Get out your spandex pants and tease up your big hair, because this Guitar Hero game will give you nights of rockin’ jam sessions with its fun selection of songs to play! The 80s produced some great heavy metal music from righteous bands like Quiet Riot, Scorpions, Skid Row, Dio, Judas Priest and many more.

If you have played any of the other Guitar Hero music games, the concept is the same. You have a Career, Quick Play and Training Mode. The difficulty levels are still Easy, Medium, Hard and Expert. The multi-player mode is also consistent with GH II with its Face Off, Co-op and unlockable Pro-Face off challenges.

In the Career mode, the venues you will play at are the same, with the exception of Red Octane and Stonehenge. To finish each most sections of the game, you will need to complete 3 out of the 4 songs in order to move on. Consistent with Guitar Hero II, after you finish the last song in the section, there is an encore “bonus” song you have to play in order to open up the next venue.

As you play the game, there is a definite eighties feel to the backgrounds and characters. They also incorporate popular 80s slang terms into their comments shown in between sessions and completed venues. Aside from that, the game is pretty much designed like Guitar Hero II.

What’s New?

Guitar Hero Encore doesn’t have a whole lot of new stuff to offer. Aside from the 80’s themed music track, there are no new features. The game is dressed up with bright neon coloring to give it that eighties theme, along with the characters in clothes and hairstyles of the era.

As for the items you can purchase at the store with the money you earn from each successful venue, there is a limited selection of choices. Unlike Guitar Hero II, there are no bonus songs you can purchase. There are also fewer characters for you to choose and buy. The store inventory is limited to skins, guitars and characters, which is pretty lame since none of them are different from any of the previous Guitar Hero games.

What’s Lame?

The most disappointing aspect of the game is the limited song list. In Guitar Hero Encore, you have only 30 songs. Although most are quite rockin’, you feel a bit short changed since GHII had a much larger selection. Not only are you getting fewer songs, but also the price of the game at $50 bucks is quite a bit for what you get. For those of us who are die hard players (this LTK gamer included), we will have bought the game anyway since we love the series so much. With such a large selection of 80’s metal music to choose from, this would have been a much better release had they included a bigger song selection.

Encore: A Triumphant Release or a Bogus Waste of Time?

For all you diehard Guitar Hero fans, you will probably pick up this latest addition to this popular series. With the neon background and eighties dressed characters, Guitar Hero Encore looks the part. The 80’s songs are fun to play and they will give you a nice challenge in hard and expert modes. However, with the limited number of songs, game price and lack of new features you may be a bit disappointed.