Power Gig: Rise of the SixString

The Short


Pros
- Has that "Breathe" song from Breaking Benjamin that I like...oh wait, it's already on Rock Band.
- Has "Head Up High" by Firewind...crap, that's on Rock Band too?
- Well at least it has "Cherub Rock" by...dang it Rock Band!
- You can sing into it and it will give you points


Cons
- Freaking everything.
- Graphics and animations would look bad on the PS2
- System for displaying notes is the worst ever
- Four characters, each locked to an instrument. Why...?
- No auto calibration; you have to do it manually (even if you take your #s from Rock Band or Guitar Hero it still doesn't work)
- Seriously, the way the drums work is impossible to read
- Story about "fighting 'The Man' with rock" is almost as dumb as Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock's story
- Load times are awful, even installed
- Makes you play the same awful songs over and over and over again

Oh, it only gets worse

The Long


Let me just get this out there from the start: Power Gig: Rise of the SixString is total garbage. There is literally no reason to purchase, borrow, or even look at this game in a world where Guitar Hero and Rock Band exist. It plays horrible, has a mediocre selection of music at best, is graphically an abomination, and has even less features than the original Guitar Hero. This is the worst music game I have ever played, and I've played plenty.

Power Gig's big push was the "Rock it Real" idea, where they basically promised that you could learn to play a guitar with their game (something Rock Band 3 tried and Rocksmith perfected). The bundle packages even came with a REAL SIX STRING GUITAR! which you could plug into the game (or an amp) and ROCK OUT MAN. The Six-String guys even flew over some volcano in Iceland and threw a big bag of plastic guitars into the lava to prove their point, and to also prove they should have used that money on a better graphics.

You sure are showing those Rock Band/Guitar Hero types, Power Gig

That's pretty awesome, I guess, except for one problem: this game does not teach you how to play real guitar. The guitar they ship is too short and is made of crappy plastic. In the game, you don't actually learn chords; they just designated the standard Guitar Hero/Rock Band colors (green, red, yellow, blue, orange) to different spots on the neck, so you can literally press ANY strings down (making ANY chords) and it'll still take. It DOES NOT TEACH YOU GUITAR AT ALL. So them dumping all those things in the volcano was basically them saying, "These plastic toys have better user interface than our sucky guitars with uncomfortable strings! Quick, BURN THE EVIDENCE!"

So you can't learn real guitar with it, whatever. Rock Band 3 has the actual option to teach me guitar and I've never touched it, and I love Rock Band 3. So...what about that gameplay? And it's much-proclaimed Kid Rock exclusivity? Can it compete in a world where Rock Band 3 and Guitar Hero 5 exist?

No. It can't. Because it is crap.

Some "quality" gameplay

Everything about Power Gig screams low budget. First off: graphics. the game looks straight up horrible. I'm surprised this game even shipped with HD options. The characters would look bad in an early PS2 era game. Their animations are especially awful, being static and jerky and worse than Guitar Hero 3's drummer (my standard for bad music game animations). The characters are completely uninteresting, and the worst part is you can't switch them out. You have one guy who is the singer, one who is the drummer, one the bassist and one the guitarist. That's it. Customization? Character creation? Freaking anything? Nope, don't need it.

After you've been assaulted by this horrible blight upon your eyeballs, you suddenly realize something. "Hey! I'm playing these notes with this awful interface, but they aren't registering? What gives?" Maybe this is just a personal problem I had, but I could never  get this game to calibrate properly. I have an HDTV with a little delay, and a sound system with a rather significant delay (something like -43 MS) which means if my game isn't calibrated, I can't play it. Guitar Hero and Rock Band offer automatic or "strum when you see a line" calibration which helps set it up for you. Power Gig gives you a bunch of numbers and says "good luck!"

So I booted up Rock Band 3 and checked my lag specs, wrote them down, booted up awful Power Gig again and punched them in, determined to glean some sort of enjoyment from this abomination of a product. Guess what. It still was off. And let me remind you: I am pretty damn good at these kinds of games. I play everything on Expert (including Pro Drums on Rock Band 3 and harmonies) so it wasn't for lack of skill. Even on medium I was missing more notes than not. I tried different guitars just to be certain...nothing. It never worked properly. Not that I'd want it to, given how awful their notes were (and their charting...horrible).

ROCKIN' IT REAL MAN!!!

So I gave up and sang, which actually...worked. Believe it or not, their singing system is pretty dang decent. It basically gives you three ratings on your pitch: perfect, passing, and miss. It does it for every single part of the song, meaning that rather than being a strict "pass fail" system (like Rock Band uses) it grades you during your singing on your pitch. I thought it was pretty neat and actually made it so I couldn't half-way do things like I can sometimes in Rock Band (though I sing on expert, so my pitch is pretty decent already). It's "talky" parts were also better in that regard, actually picking up syllables so if I just sputtered nonsense it would sometimes bump me from "perfect" to "passing." 

Unfortunately, my joy was short lived, because the career mode in this game is an abomination. Remember how I whined about Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock? I'd rather play that ten times over than play half of this again. Basically, every song has an associated symbol. Your goal is to go to various venues (which each have their own symbol) and sing the right symboled song in order to "level up" the area. So you grind the same three songs ten times until the area unlocks.

Then it gets worse.

They make it so (essentially) you get more songs, but each song counts half, except a few that count full. So you either play a bunch of half-pointers (which is a waste of time) or just sing the double-pointers a billion times in a row. 

Then it does it again. 

I didn't finish the game. I couldn't. Which means I didn't unlock all the songs (yes, song unlocking! That's always awesome, not being able to play the songs I want upfront!) and never got to the Firewind song I really wanted to. Then I remembered I got it off Rock Band Network like a year ago (and a much better version, too), so I loaded it up and played that instead. That song is AWESOME.

KEEEEP YOOOURRRR HEAD UP HIIIGGGGHHHH

I can't believe I'm wasting so many words on this review when I have better things to do (like write novels). Here's the thing: I bought this game for $5. That was about $10 too much. Don't even pick this game up off the ground if you find it lost and alone on a cold winter's night in the street. Let it freeze to death, cold and friendless. It's all it deserves. 

If I had a "buying price" it would be $-20. With that $20 you could buy 10 Rock Band songs, which would give you about 10x more fun than this game. If I gave a star rating, it would be zero out of five. Don't encourage this kind of behavior. Just...don't. 

Maybe they should have thrown all their PowerGig discs in the volcano.