My review of Kudos was one of the trickier reviews I've done for GameTunnel. Produced by Positech Games, the title was a heavy mix between ambitious gaming done right, and gaming that was simply too ambitious.

Kudos: Rock Legend, the sequel to the life-sim Kudos, scales back the scope of the game a bit, but manages to enhance the gameplay experience, all while working within the exact same framework of the original.

Rock Legend looks and feels like an expansion pack to the original Kudos. The interface is governed in much the same fashion. Everything you need is visible from your main interface screen. At the bottom will be your action choices for the day. Clustered in the center will be icons that you can shift around representing your bandmates and your owned equipment. Double-clicking on these will bring up more info such as the resale value of the equipment or the stats of your bandmates.

The top of the screen remains the calendar (though again, the progression isn't actually real-time day by day), covering the five year time limit that you've given yourself to “make it” in the music biz. Also represented there is your ever-important cash level and your fame level, which in this event is roughly equal to your Kudos. In the first game, Kudos were granted for successful life events and positive interactions with friends. In this game Fame is granted for great gigs and press events.

The left-hand side of the screen is your track list (more on this later) and the right-hand side are the major statistics. You, as the frontperson of the band, have stats governing your Inspiration, Vocals and Live Experience. The band as a whole has a Rehearsal level, a level of Musicianship, Chemistry, Live Experience, Hype and Motivation. The one to keep your eye on here is motivation. Once that dips too low, things get ugly for you very, very fast. Members themselves also have a tiredness level, which is also pretty crucial to their happiness.

I've alluded to it earlier, but the goal here is simple: become a Rock Legend. Gone is the meandering “do what you will” pathway of Kudos. Rock Legend is a focused experience… but there are still tons of options.

Right off the bat, the game comes with a healthy number of available avatars for your in-game persona. The avatar modeling in Rock Legend is as solid as it was in Kudos. Next, name yourself and pick a band name, or have the random generator do it for you. From there, you get right into it.

You can have up to six total band members, including yourself. Your other members can play keyboard, drums, bass, guitar and sax. When selecting members, they'll have a relative experience level to your current band, including some personality traits that can effect how the band interacts with each other, and how it interacts with the outside world. Once your get members in your band, they'll also sound off on who they'd like to see join your crew. And, of course, there's whether their avatar is cool enough for you to consider.

Once you've put your band together you can start rehearsing the several pre-selected songs that your band starts out with the rights to. Rehearsing is as simple as paying for a rehearsal space, something that gets very expensive later on in the game. However, before you jump into rehearsal, you might want to get working on some new songs.

The song creation portion of the game is great fun, and far more engaging than the mini-games offered in Kudos. Songs start off titled randomly, though you can name them whatever you'd like. You also start out with a preconstructed song, but it won't be very good at all. All songs are made up of seven parts. They will be labeled as being either the Intro, Verse, Bridge, Chorus or Outro. Each section will be populated by items with names such as “Cliched Lyrics” or “Backing Vocals” or “Guitar Solo”. These elements must be combined in such a way as to boost the total Quality (represented by a percentage) of the song. This is done by linking elements that go well together and by matching up elements that flow into one another, as represented by colored music notes. The arrangement of note colors will vary song to song, but let's say “Cliched Lyrics” consists of two notes, first green and then red. It starts out my song. Well, my next natural choice to follow that should start with a red note, to link those two sections properly, so I drop in some Tribal Drumming, which has three notes, starts with a red, ends with a green. My next section should then start with a green, and so on and so forth.

When I'm happy, I complete the song. To get an idea of how the song shapes up, you can double-click on it in your tracklist to read a short critical review, see the songs quality level, inspiration level and the boredom level, which reflects how bored your band is of playing it and how tired your fans are of hearing it. As you pick up influences musically through your bandmates or by studying different types of music (going to see band's play, or listening to purchased CDs), you can jump back in and improve your old tracks with new things.

The game's other mini-game is the music skill practice session. In this session, the band is supposedly jamming to improve their skills. A series of numbers will show on screen, playing a corresponding note. Once the sequence is done, like a game of Memory, the gamer must input the same sequence back. Each time this is done successfully, the band improves a bit. A nice distraction, but not too engaging a process.

From there, the game becomes all about the (what I will now refer to as) typical Positech focus on balancing elements for success. You, as the band's leader, need to focus on when to spend money on what in order to succeed. Booking gigs cost money, as does purchasing merch to sell to your fans… but rehearsal space that keeps the band happy and new instruments are expensive, too. Fans demand good stage shows, which require hot equipment… but maybe some really robust music will do the trick, so spend your time on musicianship and studying music.

By and large, though, this outing into the Kudos franchise was altogether more satisfying to me than the original.

Graphics:
The UI in Kudos is still easy to navigate and efficient. The available avatars for characters are solid and there's a good variety… however it's still pretty possible to end up with two or three people in your band that look exactly the same. Your stage show graphic will change based on your venue and instrumentation, which is nice, but the game still isn't really about graphics.

Sound:
Thankfully, Rock Legend has some great audio to it. Each time you visit a band's gig, you get a snippet of their style of sound. The game itself has a soundtrack consisting of a few tracks that I would call more haunting than rocking, but they definitely stuck in my head.

Gameplay:
The song-building mini game is great, for starters. On the whole, Rock Legend is more focused than Kudos and avoids many of the pitfalls. You never get the impression that you're not getting to live the life you want to lead because, well, the only life you want to lead here is that of a rock star. It's still frustrating when a band member up and quits after four years, leaving you in the lurch, but things feel much more integrated on the whole.

Concept:
This is really just a refinement of Kudos. It's nice to see the extra options thrown into the game, but by and large it's an evolution even more than it's a sequel.

Value:
$22 seems about right for the game, but at the same time it doesn't seem to have the ability to accept new content like Kudos does. There's no avatar uploading, or song types to download. It's stand-alone. I also ran into a few bugs that the developer is actively working on, but are still there, regardless.

Fun:
I had a good time with Kudos. I failed pretty hard my first run through and jumped right back in for a second go at it.

Overall:
Typically I side with “Try with intent to Buy” for a title like this, but I think Rock Legend is worth a good luck, so this time it's “Buy… but Try it first”. The game is still a sim, which means many won't dig it. If you didn't like Kudos, there's a good chance you won't like this title, either… but there is a tighter feeling to the game, so it's definitely worth checking out.