Review: DJ Hero hands-on.

I received my copy of DJ Hero today. The game is for Xbox – they didn’t have the Wii versions yet – and as I don’t own Xbox the nice people at Kohu-Live borrowed me one for the two-week test drive.

The package wasn’t anything what the final product is going to be (photo above), but unpacking was cool nevertheless. They should have these “sample” and “promotional copy” stickers on all models – I guess they didn’t make enough field investigation to find out that all the DJs are ready to pay at least triple for anything which has something to do with promo, rare or early copy ;)

The intro with Justice’s Genesis was cool, but made me suspicious of the game contents – action-filled start didn’t seem to fit to the DJ Hero image. However the tutorials with Grandmaster Flash made me forget the rather annoying intro and I was pretty fast fascinated by the controls.

The basic gameplay is really easy if you’re familiar with Guitar Hero or you’ve ever even seen a turntable+mixer combo, but as with Guitar Hero, mastering Hard/Expert levels you really need some time with the game, no matter how much you’ve deejayed before. After the first two hours of playing, I found my limits somewhere between Medium/Hard difficulty and found myself playing some of the tracks over and over again to master some of the most difficult spots.

Most of the mashups I’ve played so far are really smart and the use of crossfader + turntable is really well thought. After two hours of gameplay, my favourites are Eric Prydz – Pjanoo vs. Tears for Fears – Shout and a combo which caused massive laughs: Vanilla Ice – Ice Ice Baby vs. MC Hammer – You Can’t Touch This :)

The idea of backspinning the deck to create re-wind effect and playing some parts of the song immediately again to gain points is a nice feature, but the FX knob (which is basically just a filter) feels in most cases a bit dumb, but definitely raises the difficulty at certain points.

Crossfader isn’t completely loose as I expected beforehand, but locks to left, right & middle. It felt really weird in the beginning as it took much more effort to put the fader exactly to the middle after throwing it to left & right, but it reminds me again – this is just a game, and doesn’t even try to be a 100% real simulation.

The possibility to add a guitar and play DJ vs. Guitar feels like lots of fun, going to try that out later. DJ Hero is definitely at its best when played with friends, definitely the pre-party game of the year and the after-party game of the decade ;)

All-in-all, I probably haven’t been this excited of any game after I got my hands all over the first Wii games some years ago. I’m really looking forward presenting DJ Hero at Extremely Miscbehaving event in Helsinki Club on 24.10.2009 – which reminds me of this: If you’re into winning a copy of DJ Hero, head over to www.misc.fi/djhero, check the event details and participate to the contest.

And if you have any questions regarding the game, feel free to ask below.