Speaking of those three button chords, I hope you got used to them in Guitar Hero 2, because you’ll be seeing them a lot more frequently in the expert mode of Rocks the 80s. That’s not to say that the game has become harder, quite the opposite really. While some songs like to catch you off guard by being ridiculously easy one minute, and then throwing a brutal solo at you the next (I’m looking at you "Because, It’s Midnight"), most experienced Guitar Hero players should be able to blow through the first 29 songs with relative ease.

Hell, many may actually be able to five star the majority of the songs on their first try. The final song however, “Play With Me” by Extreme, is one that is definitely worthy of being the “final boss” of the game with the last 20 percent or so of the song being one huge solo that makes “Freebird” look like a walk in the park.

One of the areas where the original Guitar Hero really impressed was in the quality of its covers. While the song covers in Guitar Hero 2 didn’t quite live up to the incredibly high standards set by the original, it still provided us with some great covers of some of our favorite songs. Unfortunately with Rocks the 80s, the quality has slipped a little further with some of the covers in the game just being plain bad.

The good news is that there are five master tracks in the game as opposed to the meager two found in the original PS2 version Guitar Hero 2 (Not counting the bonus songs). The master tracks are “I Ran” by Flock of Seagulls, “Because, It’s Midnight” by Limozeen, “Electric Eye” by Judas Priest, “The Warrior” by Scandal, and “I Wanna Rock” by Twisted Sister. It should be noted however that the master track for “I Wanna Rock” is not actually the original master track of the song, but rather a re-recorded version that unfortunately lacks a lot of the energy that was so present in the original song.

In the end, Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s is still a great game even with all of these flaws. Some songs featured in the game such as “Round and Round”, “Wrathchild”, “Seventeen”, “Hold on Loosely”, and “Play With Me” rank up there among the best and most fun Guitar Hero songs that I’ve played. The real question is whether it’s worth fifty bucks to play this small handful of truly great songs, to which the answer would be a resounding no. As for the rating below, if you got this game as a gift or you held out for a price drop to twenty bucks then add 15% to it.