Review: Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits (NDS)

The choice to include solely modern music shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's played the previous two On Tour titles; they were weighted heavily in favour of recent popular songs. Even Decades, a game stretching back to the seventies, sourced more than a third of its tracks from the noughties. Now, we're not saying all modern music is rubbish, but after finishing Modern Hits, there's barely a handful of songs that stand out or demand to be replayed. Most of it is utterly forgettable. More importantly, most of it isn't much fun either.

There's only so much you can do with four buttons, and since a lot of the songs here are quite simple, expert mode throws lots of unnatural chords at you. The first On Tour played to the strengths of the platform, with several songs that had lots of fun little hammer-ons, or short plucky sequences. Modern Hits is lacking there; many songs are just repetitive sequences of notes, and not very interesting. The Coldplay and Avril Lavigne tracks actually feature charted piano sections! Why pick songs that don't feature enough interesting guitar parts? They're just popular, not suitable.

If you've had the radio on in the last five years, you'll probably recognise tracks by The Kooks, The Fratellis, Maximo Park, Kings of Leon and many more. These aren't first choice Guitar Hero songs; they're 'B-list' Guitar Hero songs. 'Ruby', by the Kaiser Chiefs, was actually included as a bonus song in Guitar Hero III, which is where it should have stayed. They're not terrible songs in their own right, but a line-up of 'radio music' is not a good one, particularly if you're already a bit sick of hearing them.

Cynically, Modern Hits is regionally targeted, with some of the songs exclusive to the UK. Not that the US or European versions are significantly better, but we have a soft spot for The Donnas and feel we're missing out. We do get a challenging and interesting finale from Bullet For My Valentine, which, amongst a few other better songs (from Lenny Kravitz, Tenacious D and Wolfmother), help redeem the game.

Vicarious Visions have tried to make Modern Hits a little more than just a 28-song expansion pack. As well as some small improvements to the graphics and animation, they've changed the structure of the career mode, whittling it down from three (lead/bass/duels) to just one. This one career predominantly features lead guitar songs, but when you've completed one, you can play it again as part of a fan request, either on lead, bass/rhythm or in a duel. Fan requests ask you to meet certain criteria, like hitting star power X number of times, using X number of battle items, getting a certain score or multiplier. Really, this is just a way to force you to play the same songs over and over, since you can't unlock new venues if you ignore all of these requests. Thoughtfully, you can skip the career entirely as all of the game's songs are available straight away in quickplay. Finally, common sense prevails!

Some of the fan requests are unusual, or really quite silly. Play a whole song without strumming (finger-tap only), or weirder still, play a song only strumming (no buttons), are two particularly unusual examples. Some more normal examples replace random notes with 'bombs' to avoid, or remove your score and rock meter entirely. Some of the more annoying ones involve reaching a chain of two hundred or more notes, and the stylus/plectrum simply is not accurate or reliable enough for some of the expert note sequences. It's already uncomfortable trying to play this without the grip coming loose or losing your fingering, so requesting perfect runs is asking a bit too much. We're still a bit disappointed that they stopped the star power activator on the touch screen from registering as a strum (very useful with fast charts if you don't fancy trying to blow into the mic), probably due to newbies complaining that they lost their streak when they tapped it.

Perhaps Gamestyle will just have to come to terms with the fact that we aren't the target audience for these DS spin-offs. They appear aimed at a younger market, who have smaller hands, are happy to stick to lower difficulties, and think Fall Out Boy are the pinnacle of rock. We're not completely humourless, and the whimsical silliness of game, particularly the guitar duels, still raise a smile; but the first On Tour did that too, and it was considerably more fun.

Please click here to view the details on our Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits competition.

Rating: 4 / 10

Words by Daniel James