If you’ve ever played a five-fret guitar rhythm game, you probably have a favorite one of those. Most of us have our most favorite fake plastic guitar rhythm games. But what about the least favorite guitar rhythm games? There’s probably a few well known examples that immediately come to mind: Rock Revolution, PowerGig: Rise of the SixString, PopStar Guitar, a game I previously covered here. Maybe Guitar Hero Live or Rock Band 4 or Fortnite Festival if you’re feeling really spicy. But I propose a new candidate for the worst five-fret rhythm game I played. Which, considering I played and wrote about PopStar Guitar, is an impressive feat.
Santa Rockstar HD is a five-fret rhythm game for PC made by Bekho Team, a studio based out of Santiago, Chile. Outside of a few games of theirs that are knockoffs of existing games, this is probably the most standout product the company has made. This is the sixth installment in the Santa Rockstar franchise, a series that initially started out as a series of Flash games released from 2008 to 2012, during the first boom and bust of the rhythm game genre. Santa Rockstar HD is the first one to not use Flash, instead opting to use Unity to make the game.
I was made aware of this game back in 2023 when Twitch streamer and overall guitar game god Acai covered it on a stream during the holiday season. He was absolutely floored at how bad it all was. Since I am a trash connoisseur and rhythm game nut, I bought this on a whim not long after. Since it’s the holiday season, it seems like a perfect time to talk about Santa Rockstar HD.
There really isn’t much of a story to Santa Rockstar HD. A rock and roll dude, who goes unnamed here, notices Santa Claus has been hurt. Being reminded of the memories of getting a guitar from Santa for Christmas, decides to wield Santa’s axe, of which he suddenly becomes a buff Santa himself. So now our buff Santa Claus must save Christmas with the power of rock. It’s like if The Santa Clause had a baby with Brutal Legend. I wasn’t expecting an outstanding story out of a rhythm game here, but it’s a good enough premise to keep things going.
The main story quest involves you playing notes to the tune of various Christmas songs of note, with a more metal flare. Silent Night, Come All Ye Faithful, Jingle Bells, all the iconic Christmas songs, plus a few original songs and arrangements of symphony classics like Rondo alla turca. Charlie Parra, the game’s composer, did a pretty darn good soundtrack here. I’m usually not big on metal covers of songs – I think they’re a bit cliched and overdone sometimes – but I totally would throw these in a Christmas songs playlist. (There is a soundtrack of this available on Steam, but it seems to come from playing the songs in-game rather than the raw audio files, so save your money.)
If you’ve played a Guitar Hero or Rock Band game, you’re gonna be easily familiar with the game’s mechanics: Tap a note, get points, hit a string of white notes to get Rockpower – this game’s equivalent to Guitar Hero’s Star Power – and try not to miss too many notes or you’ll fail. One of the more interesting changes through the quest mode is that your multiplier, rockpower and note streak carry over from song to song in the setlist. It’s a bit unconventional than standard rhythm game setlists, which usually reset everything upon playing a new song, but I guess it can be useful if you’re trying to get the high score.
Since this is a guitar game, you’re probably wondering if you could plug in a Guitar Hero controller to your PC and play it natively. Well, yes and no. While this game does support wired Guitar Hero controllers like the Xplorer controller made for Guitar Hero II on Xbox 360, the implementation for these controllers is completely broken. When I tried to play this using my Xplorer guitar controller, it kept thinking I was holding up on the strumbar, and thus every note I tried to hit was being counted as a double strum. I couldn’t even complete the first song, Silent Night, as I kept failing out after only strumming a few notes. There are some workarounds if you have certain guitar controllers, but judging by how haphazardly put together this game is, it isn’t really worth it.
Also, if you have a fairly recent powerful computer, the game may not even boot up properly. I had read stories of folks having the game not show up unless one decides to ALT-TAB out of the game after every song, which can be a frustrating experience. To play it safe on my end, I went into NVIDIA Control Panel and made sure to lock the game to 60 frames per second and made sure the preferred refresh rate was chosen by the application, as I use a 165Hz monitor. That seemed to give me a fairly smooth experience, though it’s hardly ideal.
Thankfully a guitar controller is not required to play, there is a more straightforward keyboard mode where you just tap the notes like in similar rhythm games, and it is the way I had to play through the campaign. There isn’t any big differences in terms of charting, except there’s no hammer-ons/pull-offs, just solid notes.
The controller support isn’t even the biggest problem: It’s the charting. I often play these games on Expert difficulty, which should have notes that feel pretty close to what’s being actually played, but they don’t do that here. Enjoy the several moments where you have to rapidly alternate between two-note chords and single notes during trills, with no good rhyme or reason that they’ll match what’s actually being played. Several songs that have guitar solo sections or rhythm sections aren’t charted at all, leading to dead air when you clearly hear guitar that you should be playing. Some songs take a few moments before the first notes hit, other times the first notes show up the moment the highway appears, giving little time for the player to react.
I get it, charting songs in these kind of rhythm games can be hard to do, but at this point of this game’s release, we had over 11 years of charting knowledge with Guitar Hero, Rock Band and the countless hacks and mods of those two games. There’s enough out there to get a good baseline on what a good chart in these games are. For them to not follow those guidelines and just go with whatever works is rather amateurish.
Speaking of amateurish, for some reason this game uses the missed note sounds from Guitar Hero III. I know sounds aren’t copyrighted and all, but you couldn’t even make your own miss sound?
After completing the short campaign of 15 songs, there’s not much else to do. You can quickplay through those songs, and go through the quest mode again, that’s it. There’s no multiplayer, there’s no other playable instruments, it’s just incredibly bare bones for a game from 2012. Once I completed the quest mode, there was no reason for me to go back unless I wanted to torture myself by trying to 100% Full Combo every song, which I did for one song by complete accident.
I feel bad having to slam a game like this, because the concept is novel. Rhythm games with a core theme attached can be good if done very well – see The Beatles: Rock Band or Guitar Hero: Metallica – but Bekho Team completely fumbled the concept. Maybe my standards for these kind of games might be higher than most, but I think even a casual fan of the genre would find this frustrating and boring to play for more than 20 minutes.
Santa Rockstar HD is a lump of coal in your stocking, and is genuinely not worth playing, even for the novelty of being what amounts to “Christmas-themed Guitar Hero.” At this point there’s a myriad of options if you wanna play Christmas-themed rhythm game stuff, including custom songs for Clone Hero and YARG, or older DLC from past rhythm games. It’s just not worth it.
Bekho Team are still around making games, though probably not anything I’d say that’s particularly well known. They did make another rhythm game for mobile devices called Rockstar Party, and it looks like a third-rate Rock Band knockoff. If this game is any indication, I can’t imagine it being any better.
Santa Rockstar HD is available on Steam for $5, and sometimes goes on sale for a whopping 49 cents, but there’s just no beneficial reason to buy it unless you like giving gag gifts, and there’s already a myriad of better gag gift options in that regard. Hell, there’s a bunch of better rhythm games on Steam alone that would be better worth your time and money.
So far I’ve written about two fairly bad and mostly forgotten five-fret guitar rhythm games. Yet I played and wrote about those games before even playing the rather infamous Rock Revolution or PowerGig: Rise of the SixString. I find that pretty funny. I bet those are absolute gold in comparison to Santa Rockstar HD.
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