Man, the turntable is so fucking cool and fun to play with, for some reason I can wrap my head around it a lot easier than the plastic guitar and its just more fun to use. The feeling of scratching and throwing the record back to rewind is insanely fun, and the way the game has you isolate different parts of the track sounds so cool. This game's soundtrack is almost all mashups and almost all of them work incredibly, I still listen to them regularly. With all that and being able to unlock and play as Daft Punk, of course this game would earn a place in my heart.

Rhythm games are pretty much mainstream these days. The days of the rare Guitar Hero are long gone, and everyone and their mom plays Rock Band, but DJ Hero was a spark and a light to revive this, and while it didn’t it does offer a different and new approach to rhythm games. Like the title says you use your turntable like a DJ and scratch, crossfade, and freestyle your way to the top. There’s a lot of songs, and the game requires some hefty skills to master.


Like Guitar Hero, you must use both hands in unison to hit colored notes at the right time to score points. The notes are presented on a record on-screen that is in a semi-half circle and when you see jagged notes you press the button down while turning the record. Sometimes you’ll have arrows that are up or down to just scratch quickly in that direction. The left or right notes will always have a line going down and when they move to the left or right (looks kind of like a bracket or a quick 90-degree bend) you move your crossfader in that direction. This can be tricky especially in the higher difficulties since sometimes you’ll have to scratch, and crossfade at the same time, but over time you’ll nail it. You can do some mixing with the effects knob, but this seemed pretty useless. When the red line gets larger you can press the red button freely and select one of your effect noises, but this just seemed stupid and I never really used it.


If you nail highlighted areas you can use Star Power, and your button on the turntable will turn red. When you activate this the game will crossfade for you, but the fatal flaw here is that if it ends in the middle of a fade and your slider isn’t in the right position it’ll kill your multiplier, so you have to babysit it anyways. One last feature is the ability to rewind back the track a little bit to add to your score, but this isn’t as neat as you think. While the elements are nailed there’s still a few issues.

There’s no real way to express your creativity since the freestyle is so restricted. There’s no freestyle zone where you can scratch and crossfade at will. While the song selection is large a lot of the mixes are repetitive and grate on your nerves after a while. It feels more like quantity over quality here. You have big names like Eminem, Jay-Z, Grand Master Flash, Run DMC, and some other rock groups mixed in, but only a select few are worth playing multiple times.


The game’s pretty customizable with lots of characters, skins, tables, stages, and all that good stuff so it makes you really want to try for five stars. Other than that the only thing is multiplayer which allows you to use a guitar controller on songs with rock bits. The game looks like any of the recent Guitar Hero games, but the price of admissions is pretty high. As of this review, the price has dropped almost double, but upon release, it was $130 and that’s pretty steep. I recommend DJ Hero even to people who don’t like rap music because there’s a lot of fun and skills to be honed here.

Deep in the pile of Guitar Hero games that flooded the market at the time, DJ Hero and its sequel are a very fresh take on the idea of a DJ simulator, with a really good soundtrack of mashups. I really enjoyed playing through DJ Hero just to hear what mashup would come up next, and the combination of buttons on the turntable and the crossfader give this DJ game a lot to separate itself from something like beatmania or DJMAX. (Honestly, it's more like a somewhat simplified version of Crackin' DJ than either of those.) Great fun.

Saiu pra PS2 também site maluco

Jogo subestimadasso, a gameplay é muito divertida, a setlist é maravilhosa e tem uma estética muito linda

Triste esse jogo ter sido ofuscado de leve pelos 3 jogos que saíram de guitar hero nesse mesmo ano, activision nem gosta de dinheiro.

I was 14 years in 2009 when DJ Hero came out. Jobless, I was unable to convince my parents to spring any additional money on plastic instruments - at this point we had 2 guitar hero controllers and a mic and for my house that was most certainly enough. I read about DJ Hero in passing in magazines and online, but having been given a firm "nah," I was forced to watch as it came and went. This was a year of continued Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero World Tour investment.

I can now, having replayed the entire campaign on expert in 2022 after playing through it once with a used DJ Hero turntable in 2014 or so, admit that if I had played DJ Hero in 2009 that I would not have had a metal phase in 9th grade; I would have had a far more diverse, more interesting pop, r&b, and hip hop phase that would have catapulted me out of my father's rock oriented music tastes into the stratosphere.

DJ Hero is the best Western rhythm of the 7th generation console era. This is only true because Guitar Hero, and its peer Rock Band, are firmly grounded in the foundations laid in Guitar Hero 1 and 2, which are distinctly Playstation 2 games. And DJ Hero isn't even the best DJ Hero game, but its a burst of creativity and ingenuity that should have revitalized an overstuffed rhythm game genre on these consoles; it came just a bit too late....and the rest is history.

DJ Hero is a peripheral based rhythm game that comes bundled with a study plastic turntable controller that has 3 buttons on the turntable platter, a crossfader switch, an effects knob, and a big button for activating a mechanic known as euphoria that glows bright red when you've successfully acquired said euphoria.

To play the game, you use the turntable controller to hit buttons in time with the track scrolling down your screen as a crowd cheers and dances in a full motion video played behind you in the background. You must hit the corresponding button and move the turn table deck up and down to simulate record scratching, and use the crossfader switch to move to the left or right as the track dictates, which switches you from one song to the other in the game's mixes. If you rack up a combo of 50 or more, you are rewarded with a rewind that requires you to physically spin the turntable deck backwards and play sections again for double points. On occasion the prompts coming down the track glow bright white - hit the full section of these successfully to gain Euphoria, which doubles your points and automatically crossfades for you. You must combine rewinds, euphoria phases, and pure skill to score as many points as possible.

The learning curve here is steep - holding the turntable isn't nearly as intuitive as holding the plastic guitar, and difficulties up through hard mode don't care which direction you scratch the turn table in when asked to scratch during mixes; Expert difficulty however does, which smacks you clean in the face if you're not prepared for it. It feels as if Expert difficulty is an entirely separate game because of this; it asks an incredible amount of you. Mastering it, or at least becoming half way decent at it as I have, is a pretty satisfying experience. It's a fascinating evolution of the guitar hero experience that is just different enough to feel completely fresh. I love it dearly.

DJ Hero's mixes are diverse, and large in number with plenty of incredible combinations of dance, pop, hip hop, rock, and r&b tracks tossed in to provide something for everyone. Each mix is, to my ears, incredibly interesting and highly engaging - I'm not a music critic. Music sound good, me like. You feel me?

My only real critique of this immaculate rhythm game is that its interface is essentially nonexistent. There's story campaign....just a big list of mixes to play through. It's very minimalist. Play songs. Unlock more songs. Play more songs. Sometimes that's all you need, though in 2022 it feels a little sparse.

Beyond that? DJ Hero dude. What a gosh darn game.

Played this to get a breath of fresh air from marathoning the guitar hero games, and it definitely gave me a decent reprieve before I go back to shredding plastic buttons once again. Practically every song in this games setlist is a mashup which is neat and provides a decent change of pace from the rest of the guitar hero series rock orientated setlists. The game is played with a DJ turntable that, while definitely annoying to use in some circumstances (when the game asks me to scratch one way over and over again, its a total crapshoot), it is a fun new controller to use and some of the beatmaps can actually be pretty tricky. In terms of visual aesthetics though, not really my jam. I didn't find a lot of the characters visually appealing, and once I unlocked daft punk I just stuck to playing as them for the rest of the game. I don't think this game is better than the guitar hero games, but I think that if you are into music games and want something different this game is decent enough to consider checking out.