Drums Challenge Charlie Morgan (Review) iPhone/iPod

Guitar Hero has arrived for the iPhone and gamers, obeying the decrees of Activision, are forking their money over in droves.

So, to unleash some cliches of my own, I’m marching to the beat of a different drummer with some alternative music. It might not be as entertaining as the admittedly reasonably-priced Port-O-GH (which will get scrutinized in a future rant despite its critic proofness), but at least I don’t feel like a sellout.

Drums Challenge Charlie Morgan is an app I was hoping could somehow deliver more than it’s premise. The tutorial-disguised-as-a-game has the player repeating short series of beats by tapping on the drum kit, with six different music styles and three levels of difficulty theoretically allowing novices to become reasonably proficient.

The most obvious problem is control since a real bass drum and hi-hat are played with the feet, not to mention the various stick techniques used on other components. A second major obstacle is the iPhone’s small screen, making precise and rapid taps on a drum – to say nothing of two or more at once – highly difficult.

Still, I’ve been impressed with the innovation used to make synthesizers and various virtual instruments playable as apps, so the hope was it might teach at least the basics of an instrument I’ve always had difficulty with. I didn’t care much about Morgan’s “famous rock drummer” creds, but for those wondering he’s been a regular for icons such as Elton John and Paul McCartney since 1973.

I did care that the styles included blues, jazz, soul, country and Motown in addition to rock, since my music tastes almost never include anything in Billboard’s Top 100. At the beginning this won’t matter much, since you’ll be tapping straight four- and eight-beat hits on one or two drums. A tutorial by a cartoon Morgan explains how a pattern is played as a countdown bar decreases along the top of the screen, with the player trying to imitate it as the bar counts up. Morgan rates each strike from “perfect” to “miss” (and is a bit high on the praise, calling slightly-off beats “awesome”) and gives an overall rating for the pattern at the end. Various instrumental tracks accompany the exercises, which I didn’t find especially catchy or annoying.

First, this clearly isn’t a game in the sense of Guitar Hero with its famous songs, band gigs, face-offs, career modes and high-glitz graphics. The biggest reward the player gets is unlocking new components for a kit available in a freeplay mode. It’s a drill of exercises any beginning drummer will recognize, nicely packaged as entertainment for on-the-road use.

There’s definitely a place for something like this, since plenty of people are using keyboards and other hand-operated devices to lay down percussion tracks on computers and sequences. But Drums Challenge Charlie Morgan can’t overcome the challenge of trying to precisely hit tiny drums on a small screen and, equally troubling, doesn’t seem to be precise enough at monitoring the player’s timing. I had too many “perfects” when I knew I wasn’t hitting in even rhythm and was deemed proficient after some truly awful patterns.

It’s hard to recommend this for iPhone and iPod owners, although iPad users may find a separate large-screen version well worth their time. Otherwise, percussion lovers will probably find virtual beat boxes like the recently released ReBirth more fun, while gamers might as well suck it up and fork over yet more bucks to the anti-fun deities.

By Mark Sabbatini
Drums Challenge Charlie Morgan by Musigames
$1.99
Platform Reviewed: iPhone/iPod (Requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later)
Category: Music
Languages Supported: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish
Rating: 4+
File Size: 52.3 MB