The concept behind Battle of the Bands is a simple, yet unique, idea - different musical genres battling it out for their style’s supremacy in a cover band fuelled frenzy. Represented are five different styles, Rock, Rap, Country, Latin and Marching Band.
Before beginning, the player must choose their style of music along with their stylised musical group. There’s multiple bands to choose from in each genre, and each of these are humorous caricatures of the various subcultural stereotypes. There’s a rock band of gothic mental asylum escapees, whose frontman dreams of having a horse he calls ‘Mr Ponykins’, Gangsta rappers who seem more interested in being head to toe in ‘ice’ and gold than their music, and many more musical clichés that get the 'fun poking' treatment.
Rap and Metal; seperate and adversarial. The way they should be.
The onscreen interface used during Battle of the Bands will seem familiar to anyone who has even glanced at a rhythm game in the last 10 years. There are three bars, each of which corresponds to either a downward, left or right shake. However, different from most in the genre, there is the set of attacks in the middle of the screen which can be selected with the 'A' button.
Rather than use an expensive peripheral that Fisher Price would be proud of, Battle of the Bands simply taps into the Wii Remote’s motion sensing to allow you to bust out your tunes. Most probably an attempt to make the game more accessible and to lure those not heavily into the genre, the use of the stock standard controller doesn’t work out as smoothly as one would hope.
The game’s controls never really hit the spot. As ridiculous as strapping on a plastic guitar with candy like coloured buttons up and down the neck is, you do at least get to play ‘make believe’ rock god if you can get past the reality of the situation. Unfortunately, the best fantasy that can be squeezed from the waving of a Wii Remote in Battle of the Bands will probably be that of being a 3 year old conductor with a plastic stick. Then there’s the sensitivity of the swings. A downward stroke tends to work flawlessly, but consecutive left to right (or vice versa) swings often fool the game into thinking you’ve pulled out either one of the wiggling moves – which involve shaking the controller from side to side – or nothing at all.
A novel part of Battle of the Bands is its system for directly affecting the other player. You attack your opposition by completing a string of consecutive beats. These barrages can consist of projectiles, such as bullets or fireballs, or effects that are aimed at confusing your enemy, such as speeding up their side of the board. Get in enough hits and you’ll control the music, and as a result the style of the song changes depending on who’s in control. These assaults can be blocked using the ‘z’ button.
Keeping the beat is hard when the screen is covered in electricity and fire.
This all changes the way Battle of the Bands compares to other rhythm games, but unfortunately these additions are generally to the game’s detriment. As more concentration is directed toward the back and forth aspect of the gameplay, you tend to feel less ‘connected’ to the music and timing seems to hold a smaller amount of weight. This musical tussling does however offer to those that are less competent in keeping to a beat something else to focus on.
The meandering, nonsensical path that is used to tenuously link each song together is as humorous as any other rhythm game’s narrative. There seems to be no real reason as to why each of the bands are trying to better each other than the fact that you’ve got to take on a grand master in a golden zeppelin at the end of it – yep that’s the story kids. But that’s not what a rhythm game is about anyway. The best part of Battle of the Bands is really its music, not because of the excellence of the tunes chosen, but because of the quality of each of their cover versions.
Something we never thought we’d say is that Cypress Hill’s Insane in the Brain sounds great when performed as an instrumental by a marching band. Each thematic version of the songs is incredibly well done. There’s rap versions of the Ramones' Blitzkrieg Bop, Latin renditions of Mama Said Knock You Out by LL Cool J sung in Spanish and the list goes on. Each song has a version for each style. It all makes for an incredibly fun first listening, but without the gameplay there to back these songs up they do lose some of their novel shine. Rhythm games are not, for the most part, a haven of varied gameplay and Battle of the Bands doesn’t stand out from the pack in this respect. Once you’ve played a couple of the tracks you’ve seen pretty much all the gameplay elements that you’re going to see. Which is a shame considering the quality of the covers.
Battle of the Bands has its moments. Hearing odd covers of songs you know, along with the game’s accessibility work in its favor. Unfortunately though this rhythmic outing falls down once you’ve played more than a couple of songs and the previously fun elements are muddied by a slightly sloppy and less than engaging interface.
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