Guitar Praise Review
We’re going to step outside of Nintendo for a bit and take a look at a PC game. The folks at Digital Praise sent over a copy of Guitar Praise, their version of Guitar Hero aimed towards families, and we’re going to take a look at it.
Music games hit the scenes in a big way just a few years ago when Guitar Hero started showing up on store shelves. It’s only gotten bigger every year. Games like Guitar Hero or Rock Band are great and millions of people play them every day, but there are a few out there, especially families who don’t because they have objections to the material in and out of the songs of those games.
Digital Praise, a developer of Christian themed software has decided to jump into those waters of rhythm games. They already have a version of Dance Dance Revolution aimed at the Christian market and last year they released Guitar Praise, which is their version of the Guitar Hero franchise and features a mix of classic 80’s metal, modern rock, pop and contemporary music. It is aimed towards a specific market and as such the lyrics of many of the songs make reference to God and other various Christian themes. The game is designed for your PC so it would help if you have a large monitor or the ability to hook your PC up to your TV.
Outside of the lyrics, though, the game for those that are curious, does not make any references to any religion. The game play, at its core, is identical to Guitar Hero or Rock Band. Notes flow along the neck of a guitar from the top of the screen to the bottom of the screen. When they reach the appropriate point you press the corresponding colored fret button and strum the guitar to hit the notes in time to the music. Guitar Praise features triangle notes on the fret board, as opposed to the circles or squares of the more mainstream games. They compensate a little for the more unique shape by grading you on how closely you hit the note when it is centered on the strum line. Only by missing the note completely are you penalized. There is a marquee at the top of the screen that features the name of the song and the artist and is surrounded by a series of lights. The better you perform the more this marquee lights up. The worse you do more and more lights will burn out. If all of the lights burn out you fail the song and have to retry. There is an option to turn this off, similar to Rock Band’s no fail mode, and you can play the song completely, but it’s buried in a menu outside the set list menu. Guitar Praise features a two player mode where you can hook up a second guitar so someone can play bass with you. There is no support for vocalists, but the lyrics do scroll on the screen with the song so you can sing along while you’re playing or watching others play the game.
The note tracking is a bit of a mixture between really good and really bizarre. Many of the game’s 50 songs have portions that do not feature a guitar at all and so Digital Praise has gone in and added guitar parts to flesh these songs out a little more. While they are good sections they feel very out of place and there are other songs by those artists that probably would have been a better fit for the game. Where it does match up with the song that is playing the note tracking on the higher difficulties is quite good. As far as the difficulty is concerned it is about on par with the original Guitar Hero. I was able to play through expert on all of the songs with little to no problem. That’s not to say there aren’t challenging parts to those songs, but those parts are generally small and you won’t be in much risk of failing out. The game breaks the songs up into sets of five and you have one set unlocked at the beginning of the game. You have to complete three of those five songs to unlock another set and that’s how you progress to unlock all the content in the game. The note tracks also seem like they were recorded separately and are played on top of the song rather than being incorporated directly into the track. This may have also been the case in Guitar Hero, but in Guitar Praise it sounds like the guitar track is always much louder than the rest of the song.
There are some features of the other mainstream games that aren’t included in Guitar Praise. Hammer ons and pull-offs are not present in Guitar Praise and some of the songs would really benefit from being able to use that technique because they get very fast. Hitting the notes themselves is really a bit easier in this game but fast runs of notes can be a bit tricky. Guitar Praise also features some unique chords to ramp up the difficulty a bit. There were a few songs where I had to play four note chords or chords with the Green and orange button by themselves. Many people’s hands aren’t really big enough to pull that off and there will be a lot of missed notes because of it. One of the better features of the game is the score multiplier. Rather than having star power you have a spin meter where there will be spinning notes on the screen. Hitting these notes fills up your spin meter which can be activated for a bit of a score boost. You also have the ability if you continue to hit a large succession of notes to get a score multiplier up to x9 which can make for some very high scoring. These scores can then be uploaded to online leaderboards to see where you rank amongst other players around the world. Playing well will also award you points that can be used to unlock additional guitars. Since you don’t have an on screen avatar this will be used to change your fret board as well as the sound of your guitar.
Recently there was an expansion added to the game and you have two options for buying these add on songs for the game. You can buy the entire package for $20 and it features about 20 new songs or you can buy one of four mini track packs which breaks that expansion up into five songs from different genres of music. I bought one of these mini packs and tried to play the songs on expert and was shot down very quickly. These add on packs seem to add quite a bit to the difficulty and veteran players might be best served by picking up this expansion.
Outside the songs themselves Guitar Praise shows a bit of clunkiness. There are a lot of options for changing the backgrounds and the guitars, but these are buried in menus inside other menus and the path to get to these options doesn’t always make much sense. Rather than picking the difficulty of the songs before you play you have to go out to a menu and change the difficulty, then go back to the set list and re-choose your song. There is an option to play a set list of a solo song. The game breaks the songs up into sets of five and you have one set unlocked at the beginning of the game. You have to complete three of those five songs to unlock another set and that’s how you progress to unlock all the content in the game. You also have to unlock all of the songs separately in each difficulty mode which means you’ll play through every song four times if you want all the difficulty levels unlocked. The menu system really needs to be streamlined in future releases and Digital Praise would do well to look at how Guitar Hero and Rock Band organize their interface.
The guitar itself is very sturdy and looks similar to the Rock Band 1 guitar. The buttons are very responsive and the strum bar feels very much like the Guitar Hero guitars, which in my opinion is the better equipment to play with. It is connected to your PC by a USB dongle that can be stored inside the back of the guitar to keep it from getting lost. The one downside is that the guitar uses 4 “AA” batteries and has an on/off switch. It would be very easy to forget to turn this off and run the batteries down. Overall the guitar is very nice, it has a good weight. You can get a separate wireless or wired guitar depending on your preference.
Despite a few flaws with the menu system, no real career mode and having to unlock everything Guitar Praise is a very solid alternative to Guitar Hero or Rock Band for people or families that want to play those games. I can see this being a bit hit with church groups as well. The game play is very good, and there are expansions available to add to the library of songs available on the main game. Veteran players might find the game a bit on the easy side, but newer players and casual players will find it to have the perfect mix of fun and difficulty. There is a lot of room for improvement in the sequel, but the package as it is is well worth having if you’re a fan of rhythm games or good music.
Final Score: 3/5 Average
Review copy of the game provided by Digital Praise
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I liked this review, but I have a few things to note:
-The expansion pack is actually 25 songs, not 20.
-I have had this game for a year, and not once have I had to change the batteries, or forgotten to turn the guitar off.
-The score multiplier goes higher than 9x. I’ve gotten it to go up to 40x before.
Thank you so much for that additional info. I bought one of the mini song packs which breaks the expansion into groups of 5 and I thought I only saw 4 offerings to purchase on their site.
The highest I was able to get the multiplier up to was 9x so I assumed that was as high as it went and there was no indication of how high it could get in the material I had during the review.
Overall, I really like the game and think it’s well worth checking out, especially if you can hook your computer up to your TV. I also spent a lot of time sitting on my couch with the laptop on a small table in front of me if I didn’t want to stand up.
I’ve been looking for a game with christian music. Sounds like this one is pretty good. Is it going to come out for PS3
As far as I know it’s only available for PC, though I played it by hooking the computer up to my TV. The developers have said they would like to bring the game to consoles, but there are no plans for that right now.
They said they would like to bring the game to consoles, but the companies won’t let them, seeing it as a financial risk. If you ask me, they should look at the game’s higher than expected sales and then think about that risk.
The only major flaw I find in the game is the lack of HO/PO support and the feature Guitar Hero/Rock Band has of ignoring the holding down of lower frets if it is only one note. I use that a lot.
Over all, it’s decent, but needs an update as of now, considering both competitors now feature full band support and a refined gaming experience. Perhaps they will make a Praise Band.
Guitar hero is a superb hobby, we’ve got regular family nights with each other and play.
An excellent post with valid points, We have been a lurker here for quite a while but hope to become far more included in the future.
I love this game. I ended up selling my versions of Guitar Hero soon after buying it, despite the couple of major flaws, and numerous minor ones. I love the song selection, and the expansion packs added tremendously. The score multiplier system is far superior to that of Guitar Hero, with what seems to be an unlimited combo multiplier. This gives huge weight to every mistake. Let’s say you go through the whole song and only miss one note when you have a 30x multiplier. In that case you essentially miss out on 30 times the score of the rest of the song. This makes it that much more rewarding and critical to keep that long- lasting note streak.
My biggest issues with this game are mostly mentioned above, the lack of hammerons and pull offs with only the highest note played (this gets annoying with trills) and the fact that the white notes don’t need to be played in an uninterrupted combo takes away a good portion of the difficulty.
My biggest gripe, however, was the overall amount of (let’s call it health) that you can get. For many expert songs, you can play decently in the beginning to light up all your marquee lights, and then put the controller down for the last minute of the song without failing. It really takes the excitement out of the game, with such a huge safety net and nearly no chance of failure. I would give each miss a 1/20th or 1/15th deduction, and each hit note ~ 1/60th. Another thing that needs to be improved on is the menus, as mentioned.
This issue is just above the over-use of rhythm guitar during potentially mind-blowing solos. Just look at “Who Will You Follow?” I love this song, few people come out this bluntly and straightforward as Whitecross, and it’s pretty darn catchy, too. But honestly, while the lead guitarist is shredding away in the background, I feel extremely annoyed to be playing the rhythm guitar! So far, I havn’t seen this issue in the expansion packs.
I would also like to see a visual confirmation when I hit the strumless notes, and the option to turn off that disgusting note which plays when I strum a wrong note. Also, the fact that a combo doesn’t end when you strum an extra note takes so much difficulty away from hard strum patterns, and thus takes away the reward for finally getting it perfected.
Last thing (I think), related to the menus. I spent a few days without my game saving, I even tried reinstalling it. I eventually figured out that I needed to make a profile to save my scores and such, although I was not prompted to do so when I started the game. Whoops.
I’m perfectly fine without having venues and characters and such, as they end up adding nothing to the gameplay, besides an hour or two for those easily amused during the character creation screens.
This is (i think) all of the issues I can find with this game. For those of you who haven’t played it, most of these issues will be not noticable to anyone but experienced Guitar Hero players, and for you Guitar Hero players, they aren’t as prevalent as you might think. This game is definitely worth buying.
4/5