Saturday, October 16
DJ Hero was a game developed by FreeStyleGames and published by Activision in 2009. It is a music game that uses a turntable as a controller and it features many different types of songs, but all of them mixed to some club or techno beat.
- Story -
There is no story in DJ Hero.
-- Story Score = N/A
- Visuals -
The visuals of DJ Hero are no different from the recent Guitar Hero games. The characters are representations of real people while most of them are slightly more like caricatures. Most of the things like the crowd, the turntable, and the lights all suit the game quite well and are visually pleasing. The game may not be the best looking game in the market, but that is no way means it looks bad.
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| Visually it is pretty nice, but it may make you have a seizure... |
The major things that stand out in terms of visuals are the lights. Many times they sink up with the music being played so when the player scratches the lights will flash or strobe.
The graphics in the game are what is to be expected of music games. Nothing outrageously amazing, but definitely good enough to please the eye and this case perhaps cause a seizure.
-- Visual Score = 7 / 10
- Game Play -
What makes DJ Hero stand out is by far its game play. Thus far in gaming it is very unique, especially to the music genre. This is as far as I know the first game to use a turntable. This allows newcomers and veterans of the music genre to be on even ground for DJ Hero, which is good and bad considering the difficulty of the songs.
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| Who cares about a hit streak when you can't fail? |
The developers seemed to believe that DJ Hero was just too unique for people to handle and as such removed in some nice features. It is physically impossible to fail a song in DJ Hero. There is not even an option to turn it on, which for some people would add an extra degree of difficulty. Also that would give some people incentive to get better. Having an option to never fail is a great idea, but removing the ability to fail does hurt the game. Along with that the game is outrageously easy up to the normal difficulty (far easier than Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero was one of the easier music games). The game is easy by the fact that without playing more than any 3 songs more than twice I was able to 5 star (highest star) every song on medium. With that said the difficulty then radically increased for hard and expert. Even though these are complaints they are not necessarily major, at least the inability to fail isn’t a major complaint.
One nice feature in DJ Hero is some songs that allow for both the turntable and a guitar to be played. This is a nice way to play with a friend and create some variation in the game play experience.
The actual game play of DJ Hero though is great and the music is quite good, if club/techno is your cup of tea. Every button feels like it should and the music pulls the player into a groove making them more entranced with the music. A great thing with DJ Hero is that even though there is technically only 5 buttons total (3 face buttons and a slider bar making 2) the game has many variations that keep it from getting old. Along with that each difficulty increase adds new moves to master keeping the game partially fresh for the player.
Ultimately the game play experience is the best experience DJ Hero has to offer.
-- Game Play Score = 7 / 10
- Multiplayer -
The multiplayer portion is decent. How an online game is created is somewhat annoying, and even though waiting to join a game would seem problem less there is a noise that repeats every so many seconds that will get extremely annoying. Once in the game it is exactly like the single player, but with two people and a smaller turntable (because both appear on the players screen).
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| Its only fun if its split-screen.. |
The only problem with the online is that the other player can leave at any time and a match isn’t finished unless both players stay to the very end.
-- Multiplayer Score = 5 / 10
- Presentation -
This is where DJ Hero partially shines and dies both at the same time. What shines about the game is the audio. The set list is absolutely fantastic even if the 93 mixes doesn’t mean 93 unique songs. But the mixes will become partially repetitive since the same songs are used so many times (Feel Good Inc is used in 3 separate mixes). However they’re a few annoying sounds like the noise when waiting to join an online game. But that one noise can’t even touch how great the set list is.
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| This looks good... the menus not so much. |
The major problem with the game is the menu system. It just looks sloppy and feels sloppy. The one and almost only menu in the game is a horizontal list of all the mix set (groups of various mixes) and the options like online play or quick set list. The menu is just ugly and annoying to navigate. Why all the mix sets couldn’t have been in one section that opened another menu is beyond me. It not only would have cleaned up the menu, but also made it far less annoying to navigate.
Another annoying issue with menus is the necessity to auto save after every play list. Auto saving is perfectly fine, but this can take several seconds, which after it has happened enough will start feeling like an eternity. No other game takes as long to auto save, but somehow FreeStyleGames managed to the un-seemingly impossible and extended the time it takes. While this issue isn’t game breaking it is just one of the many issues that could have easily been resolved and made the game far better.
-- Presentation Score = 5 / 10
Final Section Scoring
- Story = N/A
- Visuals = 7 / 10
- Game Play = 7 / 10
- Multiplayer = 5 / 10
- Presentation = 5 / 10
What is a fun game to play is just not a fun game to access. Along with that the extreme difficulty increase it just too much, there needs to be a more even flow upwards in difficulty. And unfortunately the music just can’t bring me back to go through the menus or the annoying online system to play others.
Average Total Scoring
- Average Score = 6 / 10
As a final note I would like to add that the scoring system might not be entirely accurate. It is more in place as a brief overview of my experience, but if you want to fully know what I thought about the game then the actual written portion of the review must be read.
