A Story of a Band Review

Being in a band is no easy task. A Story of a Band shows players just how tough a challenge it is to becoming a worldwide success and rock the music industry. Playing as a band member who has had the misfortune of being kicked out of every band, it is the player’s duty to throw together a well-balanced and talented new band ready to take on the music scene and make a name for themselves.

Management games are becoming increasingly popular throughout the smartphone market, and it’s nice to see A Story of a Band take on the management simulation genre in such a unque manner. The game does well at easing players in by giving the choice of difficulty in which to start the game. From this point on there’s also a tutorial, which does a fairly reasonable job of giving a basic 411 on how to play.

Players can pick from a handful of musicians to join the band, each with their own set of statistics. After deciding on the members, it is then left to the player to decide how to go about building up their status by making albums, training members, building up skills, and going on tours. Skill points can be spent towards different abilities and improving aspects of the albums or performances, and they are built up gradually overtime or can be earned in a variety of ways. The overall goal, though, is to build a reputation by knocking out other bands one by one from their positions in a musical head-to-head battle.

The game takes some serious time to build up to a point that the magazine review scores are higher than a 2 or 3, but there’s so much to mess around with that anything can happen. Balancing fame and fans is a tricky business, and if the band is too popular fans will start losing interest.

Splendid though it is, however, the game does give me reason for one minor complaint. For some reason the touch aspect of the game seemed very unresponsive at certain times, especially the user-interface. The complicated and cluttered interface makes it especially frustrating to work around, and it isn’t always clear as to how important certain items and skills are.

However, this incredible account of how the music scene works makes for some hilarious insight into the industry. The visuals are a little on the crude side, but they certainly manage to add some character into the game. In retrospect, A Story of a Band is a fun and insightful experience, and offers huge replay potential, but manages to overcomplicate things a little too much.