A poorly-manufactured guitar with far more defects than redeeming qualities.

In any profession you can only be as good as your tools allow. For a guitarist, it’s all about having the best axe, both in terms of looks and performance. For a while RedOctane had a monopoly on the market, which is only natural considering they also make the only game which uses a PS2 guitar controller. It wasn’t long before another company jumped on the bandwagon, and that company is TAC. Unfortunately it’s a completely and utterly terrible controller.



Here are the problems, in pretty much the order I noticed them: First, the Shredder is for right-handed people only. The asymmetrical design leaves no place for a strap anchor on the bottom. Thankfully I’m a righty, but any southpaw Guitar Hero fan would have been stuck. Getting the strap on was pretty easy, but it’s also a cheap piece of nylon, which immediately made my neck itchy. As well, the rounded faux-leather end bits that go over the anchors are very stiff, and the one at the back of the guitar chafed my right wrist when I put it into strumming position. After about an hour of play I had to whip out the duct tape and secure the leather bit in a rolled over out-of-the-way position, as I feared my wrist was in danger of being cut open.

The keys are all easy to press, but for whatever reason the Shredder is the only guitar controller that has the rounded end on the top rather than the bottom. I also found the buttons to be a bit too far apart, even with my decently large hands. The yellow center key has a raised vertical line, which is handy for finding the correct fingering without looking, but it’s a bit too raised, and became irritating in songs that required rapid use of the yellow key.



It gets better. And by better, I mean worse. The strum bar is very loose and clicky. The looseness I actually liked, despite the cheap feel to it, because my thumb never got tired. The loud clicking, however, quickly became a major annoyance. I’m also dubious about how long the strum bar will last. Since this is a review copy, and reviews have to be completed soon after the arrival of the item, everything works just fine (relatively speaking). I’m not so sure that everything will be so peachy in a few weeks, though, let alone a few months.