God Of Rock Gamescom Preview - Tekken Meets Guitar Hero

thegamer.com:

To a certain extent, all fighting games are rhythm games. With the perfectly timed button strings, the balletic twirls of the thumb sticks, and the magnetic dance with your opponent, fighting games are extremely musical. God of Rock tries to take that a step further, and is both a rhythm game and fighting game at once. It’s a risky genre mashup, but in doing so it ended up as my most anticipated title from the whole of Gamescom.

I had a hands off demonstration of the game, in order to see how the mechanics are meant to work, followed by a chance to get hands on in order to see how badly I suck at it. I was encouraged initially, both by watching and playing, to completely ignore the fighting portion of the game - I’ll get to my thoughts on that below, but for now, I’m going to ask you to follow that advice. On the bottom of the screen there’s a bar like the Guitar Hero fretboard, where you must push each button as it lines up with a circle. In doing so, you can swing punches and block blows from your opponent- the more you miss, the fewer hits you land and the more vulnerable you are to damage.

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Each character has various specials too, which all impact the fretboard mechanic. Some will speed up or slow down your opponent’s bar, throwing off their rhythm, or will place extra buttons to press or some landmines to be avoided. Then there’s the ultimate attack, which works in various ways - my favourite was a character with paint cans who would spray the opponent’s fretboard, obscuring their view. Everything is incredibly busy, and the fact that you only need to look at the bottom third of the screen is freeing in some ways, but concerns me in others. It takes