awoolcott's Full Review: Guitar Hero 5 for PlayStation 3
One could say that the music/rhythm/guitar genre is suffering from some serious fatigue; mostly because of Guitar Hero. In the last 12 months, there's been the flagship game, Guitar Hero 4: World Tour, the outstanding Guitar Hero: Metallica, the compilation of Guitar Hero: Smash Hits, and now Guitar Hero 5. As the flagship game, GH5 is brand new compared to the other games; a redesigned interface, new mechanics, and the like. Still, it's completely understandable that one would roll their eyes at yet another GH game. Yet...this one might actually be worth it. Featuring numerous enhancements to make the game more user-friendly, a killer soundtrack, and more streamlined single-player career setup, Guitar Hero 5 is definitely the best game in the series since Neversoft took over for the original developer Harmonix. While it's releasing very close to a music game that likely will be a monster hit, there's no reason die-hard fans of plastic instruments can't claim ownership of both games; they offer unique experiences, and don't you worry – in the same way Guitar Hero has added numerous concepts from Rock Band over the last couple years, it will be Rock Band borrowing concepts from Guitar Hero in the near future.
As of early September 2009, Guitar Hero 5 is available in approximately two flavors – a standalone disc as per usual, and a guitar-only bundle that features a redesign of the already great axe from Guitar Hero World Tour. It's not a huge change; same design and a few visual changes, but it does have an improved strum bar and the touch pad has been touched up. The drums and microphone are coming, but they'll be more emphasized in Band Hero later this year...November to be precise. Naturally, instruments from World Tour (and Rock Band) are usable in GH5, though it is a little bizarre to hold out on the new, improved drums for yet another GH spinoff. Given the price of the full band World Tour bundles, it's probably a retail-pleasing move to help get rid of the excess stock. At this stage in the game, purchasers of GH5 get a really good bonus; am early copy of Guitar Hero Van Halen, a game not due until December. The price – zero dollars. So keep that in mind; Activision is doing everything they can to combat the potential phenomenon of Beatles: Rock Band, and a free game for a limited amount of time is quite an incentive.
In designing Guitar Hero 5, it's easy to see Neversoft really emphasized ease of play befitting the genre. Right off the bat after the game loads, you can jump right into the song that's playing on the screen, either alone or through the new Party Play. The entire multiplayer experience has been changed; Party Play allows for easy jump in/jump out gameplay, so someone can leap right in during the middle of a song and it doesn't stop. Even better is the new instrument mixing; no longer is there a rigid “guitar, bass, drums, singer” requirement for a full band. Instead, you can play any combination of the four. Want 3 singers and 1 drummer? Sure. 4 bass players? Why not. There's a lot of combinations. This is more useful online, where there's numerous debates daily over who gets to play what...now everyone is happy. These things will totally show up in Rock Band 3.
The ease of play continues in the traditional single-player modes. Quickplay is quite robust now, as you can set up a huge marathon playlist, and the entire soundtrack is available from the start. The career, which in WT featured four separate lineups for every instrument, now is one single mode of play that can be played with any of them. It even can be played online, or with as many players as you can assemble; though it does ask for the rigid band requirement. The career itself most resembles Guitar Hero: Metallica, in that there's the “play some songs, earn some stars, unlock new tiers” component. Thankfully, you don't have to complete every song to finish the career, though unlike quickplay, the songs have to be unlocked for use in the events that let you choose a tune to play. To make the career stand out, GH5 includes something sure to be “borrowed” in the future; Challenges. Each song has a challenge, tied to a specific instrument. Some of them are fairly basic, like keeping a streak going for a set amount of notes, getting a required score, or keeping a 4x multiplier for a period of time. Others are tricker, like scoring a set amount of points under star power, alt-strumming in a guitar challenge, or whammying the sustains for a while. That last one is a serious pain. There's also a few band challenges that requires the entire group. Completing these challenges gives out bonus stars; 1 for a gold, 2 for platinum, and 3 for diamond. Add in the extra sixth star for getting 100% notes hit, and there's 9 possible stars to earn. Let the star obsession begin again.
Otherwise, Guitar Hero 5 doesn't stray far from its predecessors. By now most everyone knows the drill; in guitar/drums mode, notes come down a runway, and you time your strumming/drumming to hit them. Singing requires hitting the words and pitch, and presents an interesting challenge that differs from the more timing-based aspects. Alas, while the game has been redesigned to be simpler and easier to get into, the challenge remains. It's gentle in the beginning, with a solid selection of popular songs and anthems everyone knows, but eventually the songs get a lot tricker with more notes, evil solos, and the like. And there's nothing as crazy as playing Peter Frampton's “Do You Feel Like We Do”...the live version that's 13 minutes long. The soundtrack itself is really solid; there's a lot of newcomers and plenty of songs people have been waiting for. Smells Like Teen Spirit, the anthem of my own teenage years, makes its first appearance, and that in and of itself makes the game awesome. But that's just me. Newcomers like Mellencamp, Elton John, Tom Petty, Bush, and Johnny Cash, just to name a few give a fresh feeling, but the numerous music game veterans like Garbage, Bon Jovi, The Sword, Queens of the Stone Age, Motley Crue, Smashing Pumpkins (bringing Bullet With Butterfly Wings, finally), and Iron Maiden keep things familiar, yet new with songs making their first appearances in Guitar Hero.
Aside from the sometimes annoying difficulty of later tiers, Guitar Hero 5 does have some issues – mostly minor. The challenges, while great, are a bit mean in requiring certain instruments; if you're a guitar-only player, more than half of the challenges are cut off. This is easily rectified in future installments by making sure every song has a challenge for each instrument. Character creation, one of the fun things about these games since Rock Band, is essentially the same as World Tour/Metallica/Smash Hits, with few new quirks. If they're doing that, why not let people import their existing characters? Speaking of importing, GH5 allows for limited importing of Guitar Hero World Tour content. Most all the DLC can be transferred – such as the Death Magnetic album from Metallica that's now made its way to four different Guitar Hero games – but despite the asking price of $3.50, only 35 songs can be transferred off the World Tour disc. Smash Hits songs also can be transferred, but again, a little less than half of the tracks can make their way over to GH5. It's supposedly due to licensing issues, but Rock Band was able to carry over its entire track list, save one Metallica song and two awful covers, into Rock Band 2. So the excuse-o-meter is going off. On the bright side, all this content can come over to Band Hero, so they seem to be on the right track.
Guitar Hero 5 comes also with a visual overhaul. The game is far less cartoony – they even cut out most of the lame story stuff from past games – and because of that comes off as a more mature game. The character designer remains the same, as mentioned, so they will look mostly similar to past games. The familiar pre-designed characters received a facelift or two, looking more realistic than ever. Like usual, the game features real figures of music – namely Shirley Manson of Garbage, Kurt Cobain, Matt Bellamy from Muse, Carlos Santana, and Johnny Cash. The interface has been changed up too; there's no more fancy note runways, just a solid black to see what's going on. No longer does “note streak” info pop up on the screen, instead it's always available if you get a second. Even when star power is ready, it doesn't alert you to that. That's probably the weirdest thing about the game now, knowing when to hit the star power when you get so used to the game reminding you that it's ready. The soundtrack has already been mentioned, but it really does rock; there's a few tunes by no-names (or at least bands I've never heard of), but it's balanced out by some truly great music. The only downside is the default sound level when you start up; I found it to be about half the volume that I usually play PS3 on. You have to crank it to (heh) 11 to get anything out of it.
Final Thought
While in some ways Guitar Hero 5 is “just another Guitar Hero”, it's really not once you spend some time with it. For the first time in a while, the series is showing some legitimate innovations and changes to make the game better. Sure, it does have a tendency to lock out less skilled players with the brutally hard later tiers as always, but in general the game is more friendly to all compared to previous games. It's also nice that Activision isn't going crazy with instrument bundles right now; the last thing retailers need is another $200 package sitting around collecting dust until they sell it for half that price. In short, Guitar Hero 5 seems to be a righting of the ship, with Neversoft understanding that the path they were doing down was leading to irrelevance (the Van Halen offer only cements an apparent need to stop the oversaturation, the game has barely been talked about since it was announced) compared to the darlings of the genre, Harmonix and their Rock Band series. With any luck, the next time we see a Guitar Hero game after GH Van Halen, it will be Guitar Hero 6, and not another year of genre fatigue.
Guitar Hero 5 continues Activision's music rhythm series with an expanded lineup of 85 songs from 83 artists. While the basic format is identical to 2...More at eBay
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.