Kudos: Rock Legend

It was just last year that we reviewed Shady O’Grady’s Rising Star, a clever build-your-own-rock-band sim game. I thought it was charming, if a bit rough-edged at times. Now a second game in the genre has crossed my path: Kudos: Rock Legend. Like Rising Star, you manage the time, skills, songs, and concerts of an aspiring band. But it does so in a way that’s noticeably more polished.

The user interface of Rock Legend is crisp and to the point. Each day you’re given a report offering a number of high-profile activities you can engage in (play a show, hand out flyers at a club, do a radio interview, and so on). If none of those options is to your taste, you can select “Do something else”, and you’re brought to a control screen with a myriad of options. You can negotiate to play a concert somewhere, record a song (via a clever minigame that involves the placement of colored notes on a musical staff), increase your band’s musical skills (a Simon-like minigame), burn a CD, buy merchandise and equipment for your band, resting to decrease your band’s stress — these are just some of the options available to you.

You audition characters to be in your band, and each of them have their own attributes and personality traits, often requiring tradeoffs: do you select the musically gifted bassist who also likes to start arguments, or do you pick the much less talented guy who is media savvy and will help you market the band?

Each day you can engage in exactly one activity. The challenge of the game is in deciding what to prioritize when you don’t have enough time to do everything. There’s no busywork in this game: every single day counts.

It’s not all wine and roses. The soundtrack, which seems to consist of only one or two songs, began to grate on my nerves after the first hour. Furthermore, it’s hard to get a sense for your overall progression, by which I mean the game is better at telling you how you’re doing at the moment than in showing you how you’ve improved. But these are fairly minor concerns. I enjoyed Rock Legend. I liked its polish and its simplicity, and I liked its heart.

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