Well here's an old genre getting a fresh, lighthearted facelift. Disaster Band is a rhythm action game that you can play solo, or connect with your friends on Xbox Live.
Gameplay is a simple matter of picking a track (I recognised almost every one of the 22 tunes!), and on the basic setting simply pressing 'A' at the right time to play a tune. The main display shows the notes of the tune scrolling from right to left, an animated stick man playing your chosen instrument (or singing) and various background images that will sometimes raise a smile.
Your performance is rated on how accurate you were in terms of timing (you need to sustain some notes and match the pitch on the higher difficulty settings) and you're given a percentage score and rating (from D being the worst through C, B, A and S being the best) at the end.
There are three difficulty settings:
Auto-Tune Hero – the pitch is automatic, all you have to do is hit ‘A' at the right time.
Guided Chaos means you need to guide the cursor to the note and hit the rhythm on time, but you do get a little aim assist.
In the toughest setting, Freestyle Fiasco, you have to use the left stick to control the pitch with zero aim assistance–which is extremely difficult and inevitably sounds DISASTERously bad–getting even a 'C' rating is a real challenge on this mode!
There are 22 tunes, plus downloadable user-generated ones, which can be made with Mod.io. We highly recommend the Imperial March (Darth Vader's theme from Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back) by ericson_music and Hoobastank's The Reason arranged by Almice. There are 15 "instruments", including electric guitar, trombone, cello, violin, theremin, kazoo and cat.Yes, cat. It's almost impossible not to end a tune with a smile on your face, whether you played well or horribly.
Disaster Band can only be played as a multiplayer game (with up to 3 other players) online, which is a shame, but to be honest it's hard to see how they'd have fit more versions of the play area on screen without making them so small that timing was too difficult. Some notes come up so quickly–even on a large TV–that this would definitely be an issue on a shared screen. The problem with this is that we only found one other player (another reviewer) during several attempts to search for or set up an online session.
So... Disaster Band is great fun and budget priced at only £8.39, but lacks a couch co-op option and doesn't have a user base big enough to make finding online games, which is a pity–a disaster even. An “Invite-A-Friend” Friend's Pass (like EA and Hazelight introduced with A Way Out and It Takes Two) would have been a game changer. This feature allows the player who purchased the game to send invitations to their friends who can then play the game for free, but can only earn achievements/trophies if they buy the game–which is a clever way of encouraging friends to play co-op games together and get your game a wider audience...
Many thanks to PRODUKTIVKELLER Studios and Toplitz Productions GmbH for the review code.