What is it?

Battle of the Bands is a Wii-exclusive Planet Moon-developed THQ rhythm game. The game follows a template laid out by Guitar Hero in a lot of ways, but takes things in a bit of an interesting alternate direction. The game is played entirely as a duel, rather than a competition to just finish the song without screwing up too bad. The goal is to score more points than the opposing band by doing a better job matching the on-screen prompts and foil their gameplay with a variety of distracting attacks.

How does it play?

The comparisons to Guitar Hero are natural, but this game plays pretty differently. Control is done with only the Wii Remote. The prompts require either a swipe to the left, a swipe to the right, a downward swipe, a jab at the screen, a light wave back and forth, or a heavy wave back and forth. You’re given a scrolling track with a needle that draws on it, much like a seismic activity recorder. The prompts for what the song wants and when scroll up from the bottom.

There is one key screen element that makes this system work well: constant real-time feedback for everything you’re doing with the Wii Remote: you can always see the needle and the direct response to what you’re doing. As a result, you know when you’re drifting to one side or the other, in much the way you know which key you have down on your Guitar in Guitar Hero when you see it pressed on-screen. Without this visual cue, this game would probably be very hard to play. In fact, the controls work very well. With the variety of moves and the unreliability I’ve seen in some games, I expected a lot of trouble here, but there is none.

To play the game, you select from a group of bands (and thereby a musical style) and then compete through the setlist, playing the chosen song in the style you’ve chosen. If you’re doing better than your opponent, the song will be performed in your band’s style. If not, it will be in the opponent’s. I thought I’d gotten the idea when I was trying to play Cypress Hill’s Insane in the Brain in a metal style instead of the opponent’s country style. What really surprised me was my later competition with a school marching band. Rap and mariachi (the songs are performed in Spanish!) are some of the other styles present. One thing this title does not lack is creativity.

In addition to trying to outplay your opponent, there are attacks you can throw throughout the songs that cause trouble for the other band. You select from three, switching between them while playing. Each has a number value which reflects how many notes you must play to initiate that attack. For example, the number three will mean you will attack every third note if you play perfectly. Most interestingly, these can actually be blocked with a very well-timed press of the B button, a skill that takes time to master and really changes the dynamic of the game. Blocking while playing and juggling outbound attacks at the same time can become overwhelming quickly in a very fun way. It’s not possible to “fail” the song, as the person with the most points at the end simply wins.

How does it look and sound?

The presentation in Battle of the Bands is generally balanced, but disappointing in some areas. The lack of voice acting is surprising because there’s not that much dialog, but not as surprising as the still images of the characters during those conversations. These are characters that are present in the game as full 3D gameplay models, but talk bubbles had to be put onto still images of them for the pre-battle banter? I don’t really understand.

That said, the character designs are noticeably less sloppy than those in Guitar Hero III. There is a distinct kind of superdeformed look here that is very consistent throughout, and the models have a lot of personality. Some of the venue environments look a little bland and are clearly not taking advantage of the hardware, but since you really only see them for one song at a time, you don’t get too much of a chance to complain except in the venue flyover right before each song.

The covers range from competent to very good, and there’s a lot of variety. The on-the-fly genre transitions are very smooth. Some of the songs don’t work well with the more unusual styles like mariachi, while others actually sound better than the original version, in my opinion. Swapping genres from country to mariachi in the middle of a song that was written as a rap song can be a little disorienting, but that’s really the whole point. It’s actually surprising how well the music came together with all the versions of each song that had to be recorded.

When you want to take a break, pop open the music player and listen to any of the game’s 30 or so songs in any of the five genres available, switching at any time during playback. Check out Def Leppard’s Photograph in the Latin genre. A lot of work went into this, and I really like that they let you sit back and appreciate it.

How’s the replay value?

Strong. Like most rhythm games, Battle of the Bands has multiple difficulty levels to play through. The fact that multiplayer is available at a low cost, unlike in games like Guitar Hero the require several expensive peripherals, helps the experience a lot as well. I found playing against a human a much more exciting and daunting experience than playing against the CPU. Online play would have done wonders in extending replay value as well, but without any kind of voice chat, the whole party experience of the game would be lost.

Is it worth it?

This seems like a reasonably low profile game, and I have to wonder how well it’s going to sell as a result. While the quality on the game is reasonable, I’m not sure a $50 price point is the best place for it. I would have liked to see the game at $40 or so, and perhaps if it was a successful game it could become a franchise with higher production values and command a higher price point for its sequels. Still, I’d recommend the game as at least a rental, and perhaps those unsure of the concept could wait for the price to drop a little bit.

I give Battle of the Bands for Wii three and a half out of five.