"A fun, cheap and addictive drum game!"

I love music games. Be it DDR or Karaoke Revolution. Taiko Drum master was my first instrument based game that I've bought. I had played Donkey Konga or whatever at Best Buy and enjoyed it but the price was too high. Taiko was nice and cheap and it was worth the price. I do find music games hard to review so please bear with the shortness of this review.

The game has no story at all. Not a big deal because this game is great for everything else.

The graphics in the game are nicely detailed and very colorful. What I liked is that while some things are moving about and some things are flashy, it doesn't affect you the way it does in DDR. Nothing is worse than being distracted by the blinking lights. The little character models are cute and colorful. It all looks good and the mini games look good as well.

It's a music game so sound is a very important part. First let me state, sound effects are rare but there are drum sounds, and your actual drum sounds nothing like a drum but that's okay. There isn't any voice acting that I noticed. Now the music is just great. You get fun pop songs like Boys & Girls (Good Charlotte), Material Girl (Madonna), I'm A Believer, ABC (Jackson 5) and the list goes on. However, the game doesn't just feature pop/rock songs. It also has classical music which is a blast to play. It also has Namco tunes like a song from Soul Calibur 2 and Ridge Racer. It's nice a nice mix of things.

Now I do have some mild complaints about control. The game can be played with a normal PS2 controller which is great in case your drums ever break and you can't find new ones right away. Now the drum controller is neat but you really need to spend time on how you want to hold it. It does have a stand and I think it would be best to have a small table or something in front of you to place the drum on. It would make playing a lot easier. I played with it on the stand, on my lap. It was kind of hard to hit the blue notes. But hitting the inside for red notes and the edge for blue notes spices things up instead of just having one note to focus on.

The game play is simple enough. Basically either red or blue notes scroll across the screen, when it reaches the note spot you hit the drum using the sticks. That's it pretty much. It's very responsive, more so then some other games that I've played recently. Also with just over 30 songs, due to hidden tracks, you can have a lot of fun. You also have 4 modes of play, easy, normal, hard and oni. Each song has a rating out of ten for how hard it is and a small crown appears by each setting to show if you've beaten that song on that setting.

The game is very fun and it supports two players, which plays exactly the same. The game does have 3 mini games but they are very simple, except the third one which I couldn't understand. The first mini game is a watermelon eating contest which has you pounding the red note area and hitting blue when you need to dodge an attack. The other is a fireworks thing where red note hitting has you tossing fireworks but if a bomb appears you hit a blue note to kick it away. The third has you pounding red notes to build guys into a tower and then... I don't know. I was confused from that point on.

Anyway, that's pretty much all the game has to offer but it's a killer party game. It's also great to play solo and it can be found for 19.99 new so it's well worth the buy (that price includes the drums and game). If you love music games, just pick this one up its cheap and fun and I can see myself dragging it out once in awhile and just playing through all of the songs. None of the songs seem to be overly weak either. Not a must buy for a casual gamer but music fans will eat this game up.

Story - 0/10
Graphics - 8/10
Sound - 10/10
Control - 8/10
Game Play - 8/10
Replay Value - 8/10

Final Score - 8/10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 10/13/05