LOUD: My Road To Fame Review

There’s the flimsiest of chances that if the Activision-Blizzard acquisition goes through, Microsoft might deem to resurrect the Guitar Hero franchise. We sit here in hope, having spent a minor fortune on an Xbox 360, guitar and all the old Guitar Hero games, from Aerosmith to Van Halen. Surely it has to be on Phil Spencer’s shopping list? Right, Phil?

While we wait for that hope to get realised, we rely on games like LOUD: My Road To Fame to plug the gap. Clearly a fan of the classic rhythm action series (it gets a call-out on the Store page), LOUD: My Road To Fame has a similar love for guitar music from the past forty years. It may not need any plastic peripherals that clog up your living room, but it does have four devil horns lifted defiantly into the air, and a record collection that feels like it probably includes some Metallica, Incubus, Evanescence, Sum 41 and Paramore, in roughly that chronological order. 

Being an indie title that’s only asking for £8.39 of your cash, LOUD: My Road To Fame doesn’t actually include those bands. What it includes is tracks that invoke the spirit of them, all produced by the dev’s in-house band. That means the tracks aren’t pastiches: these are very competent instrumentals that evoke similar feelings. If you have Spotify playlists that include those acts, then you’re in safe hands. 

There’s a story to run alongside proceedings. The main character (who may or may not be called Astrid, based on a band logo seen later on) starts by playing some air guitar on a broom in her bedroom. The first few songs are played on said broom, before her dad walks in, feels sorry for her (or embarrassed, we’re not sure), and buys her a proper guitar. Then the rags to riches tale begins, as she moves from busking to band practice in her garage, then bar performances and finally a contract. 

It is, if we’re being honest, about as bland and formulaic as you could probably imagine. There’s some endearing dialogue about loving her dad and feeling like this is all a dream, but it’s nothing you haven’t heard from Britain’s Got Talent and The Voice interviews. It’s incredibly drab, and it’s debatable that it would have been worse without. But hey, it’s nice that the songs have some semblance of structure, and we could at least imagine that our incredible rhythm action skills were sending her to stardom. 

There’s another missed opportunity in how things progress. You would think that there would be a difference in sound from the bedroom, say, than the post-contract days when she’s playing festivals. Perhaps the songs would feel bigger, with more orchestration or production as time goes on. Maybe you would see a band in the background. Alas, no: LOUD: My Road To Fame doesn’t really sell the whole ‘road to fame’ bit. About the only thing that progresses is the difficulty. 

Where LOUD: My Road To Fame does innovate is in the whole rhythm action stuff, which is why we were here in the first place. The button layout is around the main character – there are three buttons to her left, corresponding to the up, left and down buttons on the d-pad. And there are three buttons to her right, corresponding to the Y, B and A buttons. It makes sense, as they’re all in roughly the same curved position, and you can imagine them mapped around the character as she plays. 

Much like Guitar Hero, and pretty much every rhythm action game on the planet ever, ‘tracks’ bring notes towards the player, and you have to tap the corresponding button when the note hits a bracket. Except, in LOUD: My Road To Fame, there are six of the things, and you have to keep on top of all of them. The notes take the form of stars, and you have to tap the six buttons in time to the music, ratcheting ‘Perfect’s and ‘Good’s (or the odd ‘Miss’) for your timing. 

It works pretty darn well. Especially on the game’s ‘Chilled’ setting, the notes tend to stick to one side of the character at a time. It’s really hard to switch focus from left to right of the screen, so LOUD: My Road To Fame does it rarely, swinging that focus like a slow-moving pendulum. It’s only in the game’s ‘Skilled’ difficulty (and a few of the bonus songs) that notes arrive every which way, at all times, and it’s when we tapped out. We found our eyes simply didn’t work that way. We couldn’t fit all of the notes into our peripheral vision, at least not on a reasonably sized telly. We ended up feeling like it wasn’t physically possible for us. 

But generally, the 1:1 mapping of screen to pad worked well, and the note mapping was great too. We rarely felt like we were tapping away to notes that didn’t fit the music, and the result was a rhythmic connection. We could close our eyes and hit most of the notes, because the basic mapping to the melody was so good. 

We didn’t vibe with the music completely. Perhaps it has something to do with our taste, or the fact that all songs were reproduced by the house band, but they began to feel samey. There was a lot of quiet-loud going on, and the lack of vocal performances only added to a lack of identity per song. We couldn’t hum any to you, or recall a single one. We’re certainly not going to be adding any to playlists. 

It may seem like a lot of red flags are being waved. The story is meek, the songs are unremarkable, and – when things get chaotic – it can be very hard to ‘read’ the game screen. But they’re smaller flags than you might think. They’re tiny flags that you might stick into a high-concept cocktail. Because LOUD: My Road To Fame manages to find enough joy in the retro rock tracks and intuitive gameplay to build a bit of momentum. For all of its missed notes, we were dragged along to the end, racking up S-ranks and then A-ranks, before dropping to B-ranks by the end. 

So, if you’re pining for Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and are willing to accept a tribute act that is low on peripherals and high on tunes that are inspired by rock and metal hits of the past forty years or so, then maybe you should hitch a ride on LOUD: My Road To Fame. There’s no guarantee we’re getting Guitar Hero 6 soon.