Ultimate Band Review

The DS has turned out to be a great platform for rhythm-based games. The Guitar Hero series, along with its GBA-slot “guitar grip”, set a standard for music titles on the handheld. Not every music title has needed an external peripheral though, with the touch-screen acting as a great tool for realistic strumming and banging of guitars and drums respectively. Ultimate Band, a good albeit short music title, uses this technique successfully, giving you the opportunity to rock out with four different instruments to a decent yet limited track listing. Ultimate Band might play well, but does it have enough talent to stay at the top of the charts?

Ultimate Band has you playing with four instruments as you try to build up your stardom, moving from venue to venue playing songs that vary in genre from classic rock to contemporary pop. There are only 15 songs to choose from, but with plenty of venues to move through as well as three difficulties and four instruments, there’s enough to keep you entertained for a few hours. There’s also a great custom music mixer that has plenty of cool guitar and drum loops for you to mix your own tracks to rock out to.

The four instruments – bass, lead guitar, rhythm guitar and drums – each have their own gameplay mechanics, although bass and lead guitar are practically the same. With the bass and lead, notes scroll down one of the guitar strings with either up, left, right or down highlighted. Once the note reaches the designated strumming area at the bottom of the touch screen, you have to push the highlighted direction on the d-pad while strumming the string with the stylus. Rhythm is slightly different, having you strum several strings consecutively. Each string will have a note on it, with one highlighting the direction on the d-pad. You then strum the strings that have a highlighted note. The easiest difficulty mostly only has the first two or three strings highlighted, but the hardest is generally all strings, making it quite challenging to strum all notes, particularly on the quicker tracks.

The use of the d-pad is so flat and sharp notes can be played out instead of having the same gameplay mechanic for all notes. This implementation also adds quite a bit of challenge on the hardest difficulty, as you’ll often be confronted with several notes in quick succession, all of which designate different directions on the d-pad.

The gameplay as a whole is extremely addictive because of its dedication to realism. Instead of a basic five-button push approach like other based-based titles use, Ultimate Band has accurate notes for each string and drum, which leads to slightly out-of-tune notes being played throughout the course of a song. If you fail to hit a note perfectly, you’ll be able to hear the mistake. It’s not just a generic sound either like the one you hear in Guitar Hero when you miss a beat. Depending on how high or low the strum is and how accurate you are time wise, the noise will be accurate to how you played the instrument. Each string on the guitars for example plays a different note, with the direction on the keyword dictating high and low pitches. It’s a really great set-up that calls for perfection. It’s highly addictive.

The drum kit takes Ultimate Band to a whole new level. While each of the guitars have their own level of challenge and addictiveness, the drums get insanely hard on the hardest difficulty and songs. It’s a full drum set, including two cymbals, two tom-toms, two snares, a kick-bass and a high hat and on the hard difficult setting, every one is used throughout a song. The quick songs are just terribly challenging and the use of a second stylus to play the drums as you would in real-life is highly recommended. The drums really made the game feel like a true rock n’ roll game, as some of the songs have great drum solos.

Unfortunately, Ultimate Band does have some problems. The career mode has you playing to 15 tracks across several venues as you try to win over fans. The problem is that each venue only has a maximum of three songs, all of which need to be played with most of the instruments, meaning you’ll have to play each song more than twice at each venue. On the easiest difficulty this becomes quite tedious as the gameplay is probably too easy, but on the hardest it’s not so bad. The guitars each have their own mechanics and the drums are great fun, so it’s no major deal having to play out each song more than once. It would have been good for a bit more variety in the track listing at each venue though. Instead of three songs having to be spread out across four instruments, why not include six or seven tracks? It obviously came down to licensing or game memory, but it still would have made the career mode a little bit more enjoyable.

The track list isn’t bad by any means, but it’s not going to blow you away either. There isn’t one song that really stands out, but it’s not that bad considering most of them were top 20 rock tracks. A major downfall though is that each song is severely cut-down to about a minute each. This is a bit of a disappointment, as some of the best parts of particular songs can’t be heard because the track itself ends so abruptly.

By far the best mode of the entire game comes in the form of the custom mixer. You can create your own songs using each of the four instruments and mixing in loops and you can even join up wirelessly with several friends to create a song together.

The Final Verdict

Ultimate Band is a worthy addition to the genre on the DS. The realism of the instruments must be highly applauded, and while the track list isn’t the best and the career mode execution could have been better, there’s enough challenge there to keep you playing. There’s a level of addictiveness that is missing from so many rhythem-based titles and Ultimate Band will keep you coming back for more. The custom mixer is a great touch and a step in the right direction for a handheld that is severely lacking in custom-made content.

Gameplay

8.5/10

Great gameplay mechanics across the four instruments. Realism is the key. The career mode could have been better but the great custom mixer makes up for it.

Graphics

7.0/10

Nothing outstanding but gets the job done for a game of this caliber.

Sound

7.4/10

Not the best track listing for a music game, but it gets the job done. The covers are OK, but it’s a shame that most of the tracks have been cut down to a minute or so.

Value

7.0/10

15 tracks all up. The career mode won’t take you long to complete, but you’ll play it again because of the great gameplay mechanics of the instruments.

Overall

8.0/10