The Greatest Game Music - Page 13 of 18 - Reviews of truly outstanding game music

Heroes of Might and Magic III Soundtrack – Review

Heroes of Might and Magic III Soundtrack, Steve Baca / Rob King / Paul Romero, 1999

After Heroes of Might and Magic II‘s unprecedented operatic splendour, the composing team of Paul Romero, Rob King and Steve Baca faced a problem when they tackled the franchise‘s next soundtrack: where to go from here? Heroes of Might and Magic II found its approach by amplifying its predecessor’s ambitions and scale. As a result, it rocketed past other Western game soundtracks at the time into uncharted territory. Repeating the same strategy – going grander – for the Heroes of Might and Magic III soundtrack wasn’t an option. After all, how much bigger can you go than full-blown operatic grandeur?

What was Romero, King and Baca’s answer to this dilemma then? In a nutshell, they play it safe on the Heroes of Might and Magic III soundtrack. This is not an envelope-pushing work like its two predecessors. Instead, Heroes of Might and Magic III is nothing more and nothing less than a really great fantasy score, with all the stylistic trappings one would expect from the genre. It’s a less dazzling, extrovert work than Heroes of Might and Magic II. However, its melodic beauty and orchestrational finesse still tower above the vast majority of fantasy scores.

[Read more…]

IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey Soundtrack – Review

IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey Soundtrack, Jeremy Soule, 2009

IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey arrived at the tail end of the World War II game genre’s huge popularity. As such, game music fans had witnessed many different approaches to underscoring this most devastating of armed conflicts. Especially Michael Giacchino‘s oeuvre had been a potent display of how to put war into music in various ways.

Jeremy Soule hadn’t worked on a WWII game before Birds of Prey and the same year’s Order of War. However, his fantastic action material on Total Annihilation had a militaristic ferocity and soaring momentum that made him a logical choice to score a flight combat game such as Birds of Prey. True, the game itself didn’t add anything new video games’ depiction of the clash between Allied and Axis forces. However, Soule’s IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey soundtrack found an approach both novel and rooted in the composer’s previous works.

[Read more…]

Kale in Dinoland Soundtrack – Review

Kale in Dinoland Soundtrack, Luming Hao, 2012

How to stand out from the deluge of retro-inspired indie games that have flooded mobile devices and other platforms? Game developer The Rotting Cartridge went with an intriguing, if cheeky idea. Just pretend that your new game is a port of a forgotten Game Boy title released in 1992. Of course, Kale in Dinoland was no lost classic from the olden days of gaming. Instead, it was simply a new 2D platformer, clad in those monochrome graphics that millions of gamers will fondly remember.

Part of that nostalgia-inducing design was of course an appropriately vintage-sounding score, created by Luming Hao. A friend of the game’s developers, Hao wrote the score on popular tracker software LSDj. At the time of writing the Kale in Dinoland soundtrack, Hao studied Computer Science and Music Composition at Lehigh University. That combination of technical and artistic skills would seem to make him a great candidate to pen a chiptunes score.

[Read more…]

Kinect Star Wars Soundtrack – Review

Kinect Star Wars Soundtrack, Gordy Haab / Kyle Newmaster, 2012

It’s curious to see how little joy music fans could derive from the soundtracks for so many Star Wars games. Often, they were ultimately compilations and adaptations of John Williams’ immortal scores – in which case, it felt like you might as well just get the real deal and buy the movie score album. Of course, there’s also a fair number of Star Wars games that came with an original score. But from Clint Bajakian’s Dark Forces to Jeremy Soule‘s Knights of the Old Republic, Frank Klepacki’s Empire at War and Mark Griskey’s The Force Unleashed titles – while they all did a competent job at replicating Williams’ signature franchise sound, the music often suffered from a significant lack of substance and felt underdeveloped.

Enter Kinect Star Wars, probably the last game one would expect to generate a decent soundtrack, given its thoroughly negative critical reception. But score collectors willing to look past the game’s deficiencies would find an orchestral score that managed the seemingly impossible. It features orchestral writing of a quality that matches Williams’ classic Star Wars film scores.

[Read more…]

Lair Soundtrack – Review

Lair Soundtrack, John Debney / Kevin Kaska, 2007

The dichotomy of “bad game, great music” has rarely presented itself more strikingly than in the case of Lair. A much-hyped PlayStation 3 title, Lair crashed and burned due to its unwieldy control scheme. Ultimately, probably the only good things to emerge from the wreckage were Lair’s gorgeous visuals and its excellent music. Written by film score veteran John Debney with support from Kevin Kaska, the Lair soundtrack quickly gathered praise from game music reviewers. In fact, soon the music achieved such acclaim that soundtrack fans clamoured for a complete score release. Their pleas were answered in 2014, when La-La Land Records released a two-disc set of the Lair soundtrack with improved sound, making the previous iTunes release superfluous.

In a way, it’s not a surprise that Debney and Kaska’s work turned out so well. Debney had demonstrated his ability to write outstanding orchestral action music with Cutthroat Island (ironically another financial disaster). Developer Factor 5 was keen to give the game’s fantasy narrative a cinematic, widescreen feel. This led to Debney being hired to provide a suitably grand score. In several interviews, Debney mentioned how much he enjoyed the creative freedom he was given on the project. With a budget to record with full orchestra and several soloists at Abbey Road Studios, Debney made the most of this opportunity to write a score that would be a love letter to the fantasy genre and to Debney’s personal inspirations – John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, Basil Pouledouris and others. As Debney puts it in the album’s liner notes, his aim was to write “Star Wars meets Conan”.

[Read more…]