Band Stars [iOS]

Band Stars is a free to play, band simulation game. I was pretty excited to pick this up as the combination of being a rockstar plus Kairosoft style gameplay really appeals to me. If only it was as easy as playing this game to start a successful music career.

The game is divided into five different sections, firstly you have recording. Recording is the bread and butter of your group and is what you'll be doing most of the time. First you'll pick the label, the style and the lyrics of a song as well as one of your band members to write it. Then you select who should play what instrument on the track and if anyone will do a solo. Finally you choose someone to mix it. All of these different sections correlate to one of the five different skills, lyrics, creativity, melody, rhythm and polish. I am always confused by polish as they write it with a capital first letter. Who has the best Polish? It asks, umm... Next we have training. Training will improve your band members in one or multiple of the five skills as mentioned before. The higher their stats in these levels the better your song will do on the charts.

Hiring band members is the third section. You'll start the game with just four musos but you can have up to six working on a song at once, plus you can store others away in the VIP section. This allows you to collect the whole lot and complete all of their challenges which I'll get to shortly. Next comes upgrading. You can upgrade the look as well as the performance of all the instruments in your studio. You can also upgrade your furniture which allows your musicians to rest faster. Plus you can upgrade the strengths of your solos and because this is a free to play game you can also buy your various currencies here. Lastly we come to challenges which act as the quests of the game. You have various tasks to complete some of which come from the specific band members you have and some are just bonus challenges. Each musician has three challenges to complete which will provide you with various goodies for completing.

At first I was really sucked into this game. It slowly introduced new concepts and it felt like there was depth to this and it was slowly being fleshed out. But after a few hours I felt a little lost. There was still plenty to do but why am I doing it? Because it's free to play you'll have to play the waiting game with this one and you only seem to get rewarded with more waiting. The solo mini-game is boring you just occasionally tap to spend inspirado and there aren't really any other mini-games to play. Sure there are more challenges to complete but they are all essentially the same. Train someone in rhythm, train someone in polish etc., this game needs a little something more. I think this is what I don't understand about the way the free to play model is being implemented at the moment. You can pay to not wait but waiting is what the game is about.

The music is enjoyable if a bit generic at times but they do have to cover a lot of styles so that is understandable. Plus the presentation is great, it's colourful and cheerful. I still think it's worth a play because you will get some enjoyment out of it at first and perhaps some of you will feel hooked but in the longterm, you aren't going to even think about this game again 7/10.