For some reason my review keeps getting chopped up with segments cut out and the remains mashed together. So I will try to keep this brief and only touch on a few things
I have been playing guitar for little over 17 years, no savant but have worked hard and consistently to improve, multiple times through the years I have revisited this game either out of my own curiosity or mentioning it to students who are interested in learning an instrument. In real life I could play you anything from Nick Drake to Slipknot to John Moreland without issue, yet according to this game I can't even play a single open string.
- None of my guitars are well recognized, with at minimum 95% of my inputs not being accepted, despite the in game feedback telling me otherwise - the on screen strings vibrate, the on screen speakers have waves indicating audio is coming out yet the game tells me that I did not play any notes.
- Microtansactions of selling small numbers of songs in "song packs" is the most extortionate way they could have possibly added content.
- Keyboards with audio buttons, audio shortcuts and windows volume control do not affect this game, it will boot at 100% volume every single time.
- Guitars connect to the PC via a USB "real tone cable" yet for some reason the game will not detect your guitar until you connect a microphone of some description and go to the windows privacy settings and allow all access to the mic, which at no point does the game need or use.
-Censorship is both odd and inconsistent. "horror rock" from the likes of misfits, with chorus' singing about the R word and pedicide are left alone, yet blatant joke songs like bloodhound gang are heavily censored and not well. They vocals are not just cut, the entire sound cuts, apparently having a song about pedicide blaring is perfectly fine but the a** word is so horrific that it had to be censored because apparently the people who pay for the songs they wish to play are not old enough to hear a** but are old enough to hear songs about s-assault. Dumb, it's just painfully dumb
The idea behind it was good, combine the video game escapism/competitive/grinding elements of guitar hero with teaching a real world skilled hobby that you will retain throughout your life, best of both words right? A hobby that is both entertaining and that is a real world applicable skill at the same time. Well unfortunately this game is a 0/10 because it being wholy incapable of registering inputs make it factually useless in serving the one niche purpose it was designed for, both as a video game and as a learning tool it fundamentally fails. If this was how I tried to get into learning guitar when I first started I probably would've quit, sitting in my room with music theory books wasn't the most stimulating way to learn but progress was being made, this game however being so poorly implemented that it does not recognize your inputs and then summarizes the song you just played with a quote like " bad performance", for me it doesnt matter, I know I can play, but to someone who is a beginner or have hit a wall and they pick this up thinking it could help them play along with their favourite songs only to be told after each attempt that they are "bad" when in reality it is the game's absolute shambles of programming it's easy to see how that could be both frustrating and disheartening.
