"The real DJ Hero was inside you all along."

Rhythm games have really been saturating the market lately. It seems like every other month, there’s a new Guitar Hero or Rock Band game coming out. When DJ Hero was first announced (along with two other DJ games from competing companies), my initial reaction was a sigh of dismay at the thought of more peripherals strewn about homes. As more information trickled down, though, my interest was piqued. In a very short amount of time, my feelings of the then upcoming game turned from apathy to excitement.

One of the strongest points of DJ Hero is that its gameplay revolves around more than just glorified button presses. The controller is divided into two distinct sections, the mixer and turntable. These two sections can be arranged in a variety of ways to suit what is most comfortable to you.

The turntable itself is freely movable. It doesn’t lock into any positions and can spin endlessly. On it are three buttons: green, red, and blue. Though there are button presses similar to the guitar based rhythm games, this is only one aspect of the gameplay. Three “streams” come down toward the bottom of the screen corresponding with each button. The far sides represent two different songs that your are mixing together while the center stream represents a sampler as well as cued clips of the two songs (depending on the situation).

In addition to being pressed, you will often need to hold down the green or blue button and move the record back and forth to simulate scratching. On the medium difficulty (and below), scratching sections only require a very lenient back and forth motion for the duration of the on-screen prompt. But, as you play the hard and expert modes, things will get much more complicated; requiring specific directions and timing with your scratches.

The most important aspect of the mixer is the crossfader. This has three positions. Move it to the left or right and only one song will play while the middle position enables both songs to play over the top of each other. On the harder difficulties, you will occasionally need to perform “crossfader spikes”. This involves quickly flicking the crossfader back and forth to cut out tiny sections of the song. I found crossfader spikes to be one of the most difficult aspects of the game.

Certain sections of the song glow. Performing every command successfully in these sections fills a bar that can be used to turn on “Euphoria”. This temporarily controls your crossfader automatically as well as increasing your score multiplier. Get enough consecutive hits and you will be awarded a “rewind”.

Giving the record a good 360 degree (or more) spin will initiate your rewind (no button presses necessary!). Rewinding increases your multiplier while allowing you to get additional points for the notes you already hit. It can also be handy for fixing mistakes in glowing sections. Performing a rewind feels great on the controller, but unfortunately it ruins the flow of the music more often then not since you are, in fact, rewinding the song.

There are a couple ways DJ Hero lets you add your own touches to the song. Occasionally, there are sections that allow you to turn the effects dial on the mixer. Aside from racking up score, you can perform some nifty cutoff effects that actually fit the song really well if you know what you’re doing. There are also “freestyle” sections where you can hit the red sampler button as much as you want for a short time.

You might have noticed that most of these gameplay mechanics involve two songs. The entire soundtrack (save for a few songs) consists of “mashups“. Before you cringe, you should know that these mixes were all made by legendary DJs including DJ Shadow, DJ Jazzy Jeff, and Daft Punk.

The game features over 100 licensed songs mixed into 93 unique, never before heard mixes. Almost all of these mixes are excellent. Several of them managed to take two songs I didn’t even like and mix them into a mashup that I can’t get enough of. Each time I played DJ Hero, everybody in the room moved their bodies to the music in one way or another. The music is easily one of the game’s strongest aspects and, in the rhythm genre, that is a very important thing to get right.

There are a select few “DJ vs. Guitar” songs. You can play these with one player on the DJ Hero controller and another on a guitar controller. It’s a novel idea, but unfortunately those few mixes feel much less interesting than the rest of the game.

While there is no character creator, there is a good variety of both real and fictitious DJs to play with (including the three mentioned above). Most have a few costumes to choose from as well as headphones. You can also choose from a wide variety of decks, each with lots of additional design variations.

Once you’ve got your character all set, you can choose a sampler pack for the freestyle sections. Unfortunately, most of these packs were difficult to use in the song without sounding out of place, but there were at least three packs that I was able to have fit with most songs. There are also a variety of unlockable stages, but like the characters, this is purely aesthetic.

The better you perform on songs, the more stars you’ll earn. Rather than using them as currency, it’s your total star count that will determine what is unlocked. I really enjoyed the absence of a store. Unlocking things automatically allowed me to spend more time enjoying playing songs instead of deciding what to buy. The whole experience feels very streamlined and well thought out.

DJ Hero is a very fun and competent rhythm game that manages to feel completely different than the sea of other game’s currently releasing in the genre. Unlike the band based rhythm games, you won’t be able to jump in with a group of four people. DJ Hero does not have the party game appeal of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. The maximum number of players for both local and online multiplayer is two, and with the $120 price tag only coming with one controller, DJ Hero seems to be geared more toward a singleplayer experience.

There’s also a problem with familiarity to the average player. While everybody knows the basics of how a guitar works, DJ equipment is more of a mystery to many people, and as a result, DJ Hero‘s learning curve is a bit steeper.

DJ Hero is definitely not for everyone. If you have any interest in it from seeing the game in action and hearing its music, you will probably fall in love with it. The quality of the game is undeniable. But if don’t like the concept of playing an arcade simulation of DJing in the first place, playing it probably won’t change your mind.

Tags: activision, DJ Hero, FreeStyleGames, music, music games, ps3, rhythm game, rhythm games, Wii, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.