Review: MetaElectric Guitar

Another Indie game caught my eye this week in the Xbox Live Marketplace, and I had to give it a try. Developer Jordan Mews has created a game called MetaElectric Guitar. Like most of the indie games on the Xbox 360, it’s simple to play. The object, well, there is no object. What you do with MetaElectric Guitar is make guitar sounds.

The buttons on the controller correspond to the seven major muscial notes: A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. When you press the appropriate button, you make a guitar sound in that key. The default sound is a full chord, but if you press hold the D-pad button it plays just a single note. If you hold the right trigger button it plays what’s called a palm-mute sound — this will work with the chord or the single note sound. You have four effects to choose from when you hit a note: Clean, distortion, phase, and digital (a real cool heavy metal sound). You can also change the pitch to create some interesting sounds.

That’s about all you do with this game. It is, strictly, a virtual guitar. While the digital heavy-metal sound was very much to my liking, and it was fun to try to play a tune, it was kind of clunky to get it to sound anything like a song. I got ambitious and tried to play this game with my Rock Band guitar controller, but it didn’t work well at all. You really need to have the Xbox controller to get all seven notes to play.

If Mews would take this a step farther and get MetaElectric Guitar to play with the Rock Band or Guitar Hero controllers, it would make this much more fun and useful. Also, it would have been nice to have the ability to play the in-between notes like F-sharp. Step it up even more and add a simple rhythm track in the background to my aforementioned suggestions, and this could be a cool little game to jam with. Maybe that’s something Mews could think about for a sequel.

So if you feel like strumming some guitar notes with your Xbox controller, for a buck it’s kind of fun, even if it is a bit underfinished. However, if you’re looking for another music game, not really.

MetaElectric Guitar
Jason Mews
Xbox Live Arcade Marketplace
80 Microsoft Points ($1)
Another music game? Not really.