It was bound to happen. It all started with Guitar Hero, it went to Frets on Fire, and now Jam Legend is out and in beta release. As an overall consensus, the online game is decent. They have a few things that Guitar hero doesn't, but they're also is lacking a few things that Guitar Hero fans are used to. Like Frets on Fire, you'll be using your keyboard as your so-called guitar, with numbers one through five as your frets and the Enter key as your strum bar. TechCrunch recently wrote about this busy little online app, and truthfully, it's worth giving a chance.


That's right, Jam Legend is totally online. Whether this is a good or bad thing can be argued. While it's nice to see online features such as "Duel a Friend" or "Showdowns" people will slower connection may find the notes lagging a bit. At my office Jam Legend seemed to run perfectly fine, however, at home I found the notes lagging a bit. It was still playable, just a bit annoying at times. It meshes together light social networking feature allowing you to add friends and followers to your profile. The single player is solid, housing a plethora of options and stats that show your progress. For instance, while playing songs you'll find a vertical bar to the right of the screen depicting your "goal" for that song along with the "best score" by the community. You get a global rating and a global rank within the community, though it doesn't mean much beside status.

The few things that they didn't copy from Guitar Hero is the star power and the star rating after each song. Being a serious Guitar Hero player myself, as well as being part of the ScoreHero community, these shortcomings make Jam Legend feel a bit lacking. Sustain notes and hammer-ons/pull-offs are still present and work just as you're used to in Guitar Hero. You have your "rock meter" so to speak as your indicator of how well or how poorly you're doing while playing songs. Furthermore, you have a note streak and multiplier that cleanly mimics Guitar Hero.


Ultimately, Jam Legend is combining both Guitar Hero and ScoreHero together into one happy bundle. They keep track of your scores and progress and also have leaderboards for all the songs. And obviously being a smaller start-up, the available songs in Jam Legend are all done from smaller indie artists, but still the songs are decent. Being online, they can continually update and improve the app as they start receiving solid feedback. And it's obvious that they are looking to expand even more into the Rock Band frontier, seeing how they already have slots for Bass, Drums, and Piano, on the instrument selection screen. In the end, it's a well-made site that boasts as a nice Guitar Hero clone, has a clean user interface, and solid multiplayer functionality. Jam Legend gets a 85%!