Recent reviews by xyxxy13

I put 80+ hours into this just because I love chess but I can't recommend it. The 100 levels of difficulty for the computer player are clustered in a narrow range making that gameplay repetitive. I ran into numerous glitches: clock time jumps leading to losses when ahead on time, legal moves not allowed, online disconnects, very poor game counts registering every 2nd or 3rd game making it difficult to reach online achievements. But the worst is the small community of players making it difficult to find an online game with a well-matched opponent. Some days I left a game offer open for hours with no takers. I agree with other reviewers: try chessbase.com, chess.com, or lichess.org for a much better experience.

After reaching all 47 achievements, I guess its time for a review. This game is the most awesome learning experience for a musical instrument I've ever encountered in any media. I've tried learning guitar a few times in the past but it was boring and painful making it hard to stick with it. This game isn't perfect but it gets so much right, you just want to keep coming back for more. I hope this game has a very long life.

One of the achievements was bass only so I decided to get the Electro-Harmonix PitchFork pedal so I could switch between playing all 3 paths (lead, rhythm, bass) at the press of a button. That was a great addition to my setup and opened up all the bass items which are a lot of fun too. I'm playing with a basic starter guitar: Epiphone Special II.

Pros: The most motivating features for me were the achievements and the methods for grading your progress. Each song has 5 ways of scoring your progress (Learn A Song percentage, 4 levels of Score Attack) that makes me want to ace them all. Learn A Song supports a breadth-first progression through a song (gradually adding notes as you get better in each phrase) and Score Attack is an arcade-style depth first progression through a difficulty level (Easy, Medium, Hard, Master). Master mode hides the notes and was scary at first but its a great motivator for weaning you off the sight-reading and encourages you to listen for cues instead. Learn A Song also has Riff Repeater which allows you to mark a section and then slow it down and vary the difficulty level -- this is indispensible for getting those hard riffs down. I also enjoyed working through the Lessons and Guitarcade. Guitarcade is a collection of about a dozen games and they are an excellent way to get some technique practice in without feeling like you're doing something as boring as scales. I'd really like to see more of these mini-games as they are much more fun than practice exercises.

Cons: Ubisoft sites really suck at consistency. Achievements and unlocks are shown on the Ubisoft site, the Rocksmith site, and Steam. Steam is rock solid but the others are woefully inconsistent and aggravating to use. 500 missions? Really? What an annoying achievement! Guitarcade's Hurtling Hurdles seems much too sensitive and poorly balanced compared to the other games. Session mode -- the mission system kept pushing this but I found it a dreadful bore since I'm not good enough to improvise anything interesting at this point.