I never reviewed a freeware game here and I think now is the right time to do that.

Overview
Frets On Fire is an open source game, similar to the very popular Guitar Hero. The aim of the game is to play the guitar with your keyboard.

Review
I like rock music, electric guitars and all that. I used to say that a song that doesn’t have any guitar in it has nothing to do with music I never learned to play the guitar, although I always wanted to.

I was curious to see if playing the guitar on my keyboard would give me the feeling that I was expecting. I was afraid that the whole thing would be too artificial, like playing a first person shooter.

But after playing Frets On Fire for a few minutes my fears were forgotten. It’s a great game! I actually got in the mood of every song that I was playing, felt the rhythm and the beat. Maybe you can’t picture that, so I’ll show you what it’s all about with a video that somebody posted on YouTube.

See what I mean? I must admit, now I’m a little bit addicted to Frets On Fire because it’s the perfect thing to do when I come home after a long stressful day. My skills are not very good though, I almost sprained my wrist while trying to play “Sultans Of Swing” Yep, there are lots of songs that you can import into the game, just check out the fan forums and you’ll find hundreds of them, maybe thousands, I didn’t count. And as far as I know the game will work just fine with a guitar controller like those that Guitar Hero uses.

Version Tested
1.2.512

Authors

Game Design, Programming – Sami Kyöstilä

Music, Sound Effects – Tommi Inkilä

Graphics – Joonas Kerttula

Operating System 
Windows, Linux, Mac OS X

Size 
32.34 MB

Download link

Summary

Good game play, funny and addictive

Highly customizable, you can import the songs that you like

Sometimes crashes but fortunately never while playing a song (so far)

Rating
 

Verdict

This has become one of my favorite games, I play a song or two every day. The fact that these people made it open source is simply amazing. I think that they should get a Nobel Prize or something!

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