While Rock Band Unplugged was getting a release on the PSP, Guitar Hero was gracing the Nintendo DS once again with the third, and final, game in the On Tour series. Developer Vicarious Visions wanted to pull out all the stops for the third game in their handheld trilogy, with perfected gameplay and even developing a new visual style for the game to make it stand out from the same-ness that was the previous two titles. This would result in Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits, a game that on paper, mixes up the formulaic expectations of the franchise in a way that differentiates it.
In practice though, this new formula that Vicarious Visions made struggles to really shine under the weight of some poor decisions. Modern Hits is not a carbon copy of On Tour with a gimmick, but rather a wholly different game with a different gameplay loop. It is a loop that, while needed for a mainline series Guitar Hero game. But for a handheld version, the design change accentuates the flaws of the On Tour series to a point of being a tedious experience.
The change in question is not really a graphical one, which is basically the same format as the previous two games with an updated counter for tracking notes and scores. It is instead a gameplay progression. Modern Hits eliminates the fixed setlist and venue formula that has been commonplace in almost all Guitar Hero games, and instead tries to be more open-ended like the Rock Band series.
Credit where it's due, this is a needed change as Guitar Hero tends to be super predictable with its formula of setlist and venue without any real deviation. World Tour played with this somewhat but the inability to play custom setlists like Rock Band is still a sore spot for the series, despite having cooler visuals and more fantastical venues.
Where things falter however is how this all comes together; Modern Hits takes the idea of open-ended gameplay through challenges called fan requests. These requests force players to go through all of the gameplay modes in order to progress and unlock more songs. Some are straightforward, like getting a minimum note streak for a song or a certain score multiplier, others can be difficult, like hitting a certain percentage of notes. Some of these requests also added modifiers to the request, like you're allowed no strumming while playing or you have to avoid bomb notes that can show up on a track.
Completing the fan requests nets you extra fans, which acts as your progression gauge for the game. So outside of playing the songs to unlock them, you also need to complete fan requests of these said songs to continue progression. You also need to do this with both guitar and bass to unlock all of the game's content, or even have fan requests for a guitar duel.
On paper this adds replayability and actually challenges the player enough to be interesting. In practice, it is an exercise of mostly tedious gameplay. Replaying the same songs with limitations or challenges works, but is severely limited by two factors; the song selection and overall charting.
Modern Hits, as its name implies, was a set list made out of at the time modern songs from the early to late 2000s. The setlist is large enough for the DS, with 28 songs in game. With all of them being modern songs from the 2000's, however, the setlist suffers heavily from being very 'samey' in terms of presentation. Bands like Foo Fighters, Wolfmother, Lenny Kravitz, and the Kaiser Chiefs get representation, but many of their songs blend together in style, leading to the second problem, the charting.
Vicarious Visions noted that they worked on making strumming and overall feel of Modern Hits to be more accurate than before. Strumming does feel more responsive than the other On Tour games, but the amount of charts that require it are borderline ridiculous. Most of the songs have a chart with a strumming section, and some are just strumming sections for the main riffs, leading to a pretty rough problem of the songs all playing relatively the same.
In fact, when a guitar solo with hammer-ons or pull offs does show up, it's both rare and somewhat frustrating, especially because the game is so unbalanced in regards to its difficulty. The few metal and hard rock songs on the soundtrack are required to play through, and include the likes of "Falling Down" by Atreyu, "Paralyzer" by Finger Eleven, and "Shockwave" by Black Tide, a chart that is on the same level as "Satch Boogie" in On Tour: Decades, but is not a bonus song this time. "Shockwave" is notorious to the point of never being 100% on actual hardware, meaning no player has a verified 100% on the song on a DS with the Guitar Grip ever recorded.
The fact that "Shockwave" is even on the main setlist is insanity, but then add fan requests to the mix, and you can sort of see the problems that arise. The final stretch of the game is able to be more unique than the rest of Modern Hits, but its difficulty spike is really frustrating. Coupled with the same problems with the Guitar Grip that have been around since the beginning, and you have a near impossible wall for the final stretch of the game.
The setlist, for the first time in Guitar Hero, is the major let down here. Too many of the songs in Modern Hits have a pop-indie feel to them, which works if you have more variety. Yes, you get some metal and punk songs in there, but they are more exceptions versus balance. You also have another problem that has been persistent for the handheld games; a decent chunk of the setlist is on other Guitar Hero titles or switched around for the European release. In total, 10 out of 28 songs were either on Guitar Hero 3, World Tour, DLC, or the upcoming Guitar Hero 5. Even songs like "Shockwave" were featured in Rock Band as a downloadable, so most of the setlist is not locked to the DS this time around.
That really is the problem here with Modern Hits, it just feels boring to play. The lack of song variety is a cardinal sin for a rhythm game like this, and through it, the lack of unique charting is apparent. It is clear Vicarious Visions tried to compensate by changing up the gameplay with fan requests, but it instead highlights the flaws instead of hiding them. Guitar Hero has mostly avoided that trap before, even with the more metal-centric Encore: Rock's the 80's, or Guitar Hero Metallica, because the variety came not with the song genres, but with the song charts and composition. Throw in a few outlier songs that compliment the soundtracks, and those games thrive because they are able to be challenging or unique enough to stand mostly on their own.
Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits does not have that luxury. The setlist of modern songs showcases a lack of variety in the charting for the majority of them, and the few songs that are different are such a spike in difficulty it's almost impossible to enjoy them. The fan requests would be a good idea in any other Guitar Hero game, but for Modern Hits they highlight the major flaws the DS Guitar Hero games have, overall making Modern Hits a wholly skippable experience. Vicarious Visions ends their trilogy with a grave miscalculation, leaving Modern Hits the last Guitar Hero - specific game on the system.
Authors Note: Screenshots for the game were captured on emulation from the following channels: