DJ Hero 2

I liked the original DJ Hero, it was a serviceable first effort for an innovative step for the genre, but thought there wasn’t enough there to really motivate me to play much of it after writing my review. This will be a fairly short review since not a whole lot has changed so I do suggest giving that a once over if you know nothing about the DJ Hero franchise, otherwise read on to see if I thought the changes were significant enough to make this a worth while title.

The follow up to last year’s DJ Hero really seems to be the game that the developer freestyle games had in mind for DJ Hero when they finally settled on their peripheral. My biggest complaint with the original DJ Hero is that I was having trouble relating my actions to the music resultant, the gameplay changes I feel has resolved this and as a result the fun factor of this game increases ten fold if not more. Whether it is partially the fault of an excellent (no seriously, top notch) collection of mixes, or an improvement to the track mapping, or the handful of additions and improvements to the freestyle sections.

DJ Hero 2 introduces an “Empire Mode”, which plays out not unlike other campaigns in the Hero franchise, you play through each of the songs collecting stars, unlocking characters and accessories, to pimp your dude with things you never get to see anyway. Regrettably they dug a little too deep into the Hero’s playbook, or garbage bin however you look at it, they’ve scattered “DJ Battles” that play out like the guitar battles that was in some of the older Guitar Hero games, more or less a vs mode against the AI. Like in the GH games I didn’t find it all that fun because the music felt like it they sacrificed good music to making something difficult, and although going back and forth, makes more sense in the DJ context it’s still feels like the computer is cheating some times. As you progress, you unlock new venues, and most (if not all) open up with a megamix figuring one of the guest DJs. The mega mixes are 3-5 song non-stop setlist that are pretty great and are a pretty good way to pass the time. Now if they figured out how to do this with custom playlists they’d seriously be onto something.

So while I think the “DJ Battles” in “Empire Mode” are a bit of a failing playing these competitive modes with a friend is actually pretty fun. It just feels a little less cheaty that way. It only took a few seconds for the match maker to do it’s work, and it had most of the options you’d want, set the length of the setlist, your opponents level (which is based off an experience point type system djp associated with your profile). The one setting missing that disappointed me, was the difficulty setting, I was playing on Hard, and kept getting put up against opponents on Medium and in some of the modes there are some competitive imbalances that you’d hope to be playing someone on the same difficulty or at least have an option for it.

Really the key improvements here are in the freestyle gameplay elements. First, they updated the freestyle samples to use appropriate samples at various points of the song, this is so much better than last years which you basically picked a sample set and used it for all songs, most of the time it sounded terrible. Second, free style scratches, these are awesome, it’s basically a short loop they let you play with, you can start and stop your scratch and get a little sample in there and pick your scratch up again. Finally, freestyle cross fades where you can switch between tracks on your own,  though they do leave some markers on the highway that gives you some clues where key parts of the tracks are to make it a little more intuitive. The trick here is that a lot of the time, with very little effort, these freestyle sections sound good! and because they sound good they make you feel good! And, coincidentally feeling good makes games more fun!

Needless to say, I still doubt that this game is for everyone, but I can say, if you feel a little curious about it, and/or it seems a little interesting to you I can whole heartedly suggest picking it up, there is a lot of fun gameplay in here both on and offline, and a really good, really well rounded soundtrack to play with. If they continue to support DJ Hero 2 with DLC in a way that is superior to how Guitar Hero has done it, I’ll be a pretty happy guy.