Air Guitar Warrior for Kinect gets new edition plus ton of fixes!

You may have played Air Guitar Warrior for Kinect on Xbox One. After all, if you’re a Kinect fan, then it’s one of the few options you have. Now though, the team at Virtual Air Guitar Company have confirmed that a brand new edition of the game will soon be arriving, whilst today sees a fairly substantial fix list hit home.

First things first, and Air Guitar Warrior Gamepad Edition will be rocking up on Xbox One come June 15th 2017. Priced at $14.99 / €14.99 / £11.99, the Gamepad Edition is a rhythm shooter for anyone who enjoys a bit of over-the-top rock attitude in their indie games. It features weaponized guitars, motorbikes and cyber-dinosaurs, with no less than 50 hand-painted levels inspired by the history of rock providing the background.

The best thing about it though, is that if you bought the Kinect version of the game, you will get a free copy of the Gamepad Edition sent through to your account within 30 days of release.

If you don’t know much about the game, then it basically consists of your classic side-scrolling action, placed within a rhythm game. Your guitar is your weapon, and you fire it by tapping buttons in time to the music.

Aki Kanerva, Founder and Lead Designer at Virtual Air Guitar Company, provides an example of one of the game’s 8 guitars: “The Spectral Axe can fire giant axes that spin like boomerangs, axes that bounce, axes that fly through enemies, or the spirits of ancient viking rockers unleashed in a destructive torrent!” The player is also in control of the game’s rock’n’roll soundtrack. Every song has 5 guitar layers, controlled by the different fire modes. Kanerva explains, “You’re not just playing along to an existing soundtrack, you’re playing the lead guitar yourself. In a tight spot, you’ll need to constantly change playing styles to deal with shields, forcefields and tough enemies, and eventually you enter a zen state of flow, blasting flying skulls and making music at the same time,” says Kanerva.

The soundtrack for the game was produced specifically by Mika Tyyskä / Mr. Fastfinger and Samppa Siurala. Tyyskä says, “I’ve been playing guitar for almost 30 years, it was very liberating to finally write music and riffs for air guitar! For each song, we wrote various lead guitar layers in different speeds: fast, faster, fasterer… no sweat or blood was spared when the most furious parts were laid down!” Siurala adds, “This project was a great combo – creating multiple different styles was an awesome challenge and at the same time it was a dive back to basics: solid rock!”

Feature will include:

• 50 hand-painted levels
• 21 vehicles including dinosaurs, sharks with lasers, tigers and jet-powered crocodiles, featuring different gameplay for flying and ground vehicles
• 13 giant bosses
• 8 guitar weapons including a customizable sword-guitar
• 5 unique fire modes per guitar: switch modes tactically to survive
• Custom soundtrack by Mika Tyyskä / Mr. Fastfinger and Samppa Siurala with 19 tracks ranging from classic rock to heavy metal
• The guitar responds to your playing: each fire mode has a different lead guitar track

But that’s not the only Air Guitar Warrior news as it has also been announced that Update 1.1 for Air Guitar Warrior for Kinect is now available.

This update adds a number of new features, allowing the option to now zoom into your poses in album covers for a closer look, before taking a screenshot to share with your friends! Additionally a bonus duet with Zeus is in place as a reward for completing the game on Expert Difficulty, whilst visual indicators have been included to to show where bosses are about to attack.

New features and fixes include:

• Zoom in to album covers. Take a screenshot!
• Play a duet with Zeus! Complete the game on Expert and play level 50.
• Bosses telegraph their attacks (Normal Difficulty only).
• Better font.
• Improved aiming stability and responsiveness.
• If Kinect has trouble seeing your hands, the guitar will no longer jump up and down. Instead, the guitar will stop moving. If this happens, try holding your hands a little bit more forward.
• Increased power of Spectral Axe slow rhythm.
• Fixed rare issue where enemies could disappear.
• Improved tutorials.
• Fixed lasers sometimes not hitting enemies.
• Fixed rare crash in the middle of a level.
• Fixed rare issue where the green tutorial box would show static instead of the tutorial character.
• Player rank increases correctly even if you quit or restart a level.
• Various graphical fixes.

If you haven’t yet played Air Guitar Warrior and wish to know more about it, then it may be an idea to hit up our full review.