Guitar Legend

On console, the appeal of playing the Guitar Hero games is the sheer joy of hammering away at a guitar peripheral while wearing a headband, pulling rawk shapes, and gurning like you're Richie Sambora going through a particularly bad spot of constipation.

And let's be clear, if you're NOT wearing a headband, you're just not playing properly.

But anyway, the appeal is pretty physical. So, to try and translate the concept to a mobile phone sans plug-in guitar is surely asking for trouble. Especially when you consider the added barrier that most mobile gamers play with the sound turned off.

This hasn't scared Gameloft, though. It might not have the official Guitar Hero mobile licence (Hands-On bagged that, although it hasn't resulted in a game yet), but it's made its own version, and licensed in some top tracks for you to play along with.

Such as? Iron Maiden's 'Run To The Hills' and Deep Purple's 'Smoke On The Water' for starters, along with Nirvana's 'Heart-Shaped Box' and The Scorpions' 'Rock You Like a Hurricane'. Plus there's tracks from Bloc Party, The Police, David Bowie and The Killers.

It's a stellar line-up, even if we would've chucked out those last four in favour of The Darkness, Guns N' Roses, Metallica and Yngwie Malmsteen.

The basic game puts you in the shoes of an up-and-coming axe-spanker, riffing your way to the top of the rock tree. The gameplay follows the Guitar Hero formula, with notes travelling down a guitar neck towards you, and you pressing the right buttons at the right times to play them, thus building up your score. There's also a power gauge that fills up as you play, enabling you to press '8' or '0' for a power-riff, which bumps up your points.

Each song is available in three versions – Light, Advanced and Expert – which vary in length and difficulty. The bulk of the game is in its Career mode, where you work your way through venues of different sizes, being scored out of five for every song you attempt and unlocking new chapters if you do well. You get to choose one of a group of aspiring rockers to play as, including the likes of Chainsaw Rob, Tesla Gordon and Axl Carnaby.

We'll say first, the audio quality is excellent. Forget your preconceptions about rubbish mobile game sound – on the N73 version we reviewed, it was clear Gameloft has put a lot of work into ensuring the songs sound as good as you'd hope.

However, you'll obviously need to carry your handset's earphones around with you to enjoy the music, unless you're socially-toxic enough to be happy blasting The Scorpions out to your fellow bus or train passengers. But with music handsets more common, that's not a huge restriction any more. (And although you can play the game in silent mode, why would you?)

The game has a well-designed learning curve in Career mode, too, gradually ramping up the difficulty, and providing you with prizes along the way which can be checked out in the separate Gallery section. In addition, there's a host of information on your performances, rating how many notes you hit, how many you nail perfectly, and stumping up (virtual) money as a reward.

The problem comes when you step up a gear, though, to playing the Expert versions. See, Light mode just uses three notes in the middle of the guitar neck, mapping them to the '4', '5' and '6' keys on your phone. Advanced gets you pressing two buttons at once for power-chords, which is fine (albeit putting paid to one-handed play).

However, Expert mode adds in the outer two notes on the guitar, mapping them to '1' and '3' on your keypad (although an alternative control scheme switches the middle three notes to the top row of your keypad, and the outer notes to the second row).

Either way, it doesn't quite work. You're looking at five notes in a horizontal line on screen, and trying to control them using two rows of your keypad. We struggled, with our hand-eye-brain co-ordination simply not up to the task when the going got tough.

It's a mark of Guitar Legend's quality that we're still trying valiantly to master it, but it's an unavoidable problem of trying to squeeze this particular game genre (which even on console requires a dedicated controller) into a 3x3 mobile keypad.

Up until that point, however, Guitar Legend is excellent. With that in mind, plus the fact that there's plenty of gameplay in the Light and Advanced modes before you get to the evil Expert section, we've opted for the rating below – control flaws in its latter stages aside, this game rocks up a storm.

Guitar Legend

Fantastic music game, although to finish it you'll need fingers as fast as Eddie Van Halen
Score
Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)