Guitar Hero 5 Review [360]

07 Oct 2009 at 12:20:59 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (360)

It's been a long and rocky road for Neversoft. Once Harmonix departed from the Guitar Hero franchise, Activision employed the company, best known for the Tony Hawk series, to make Guitar Hero 3. This didn't turn out all that well. Some, admittedly, adored it, but the less-than-accurate strumming, the often-ridiculous note charts, the inconsistent difficulty, and those frigging guitar duels led to it being considered an inferior copy of Harmonix's earlier games, and certainly less so than the glorious Rock Band. Well, when Rock Band eventually came out, anyway.

Guitar Hero: World Tour suffered a similar fate, despite improvements, but now Guitar Hero 5 is here, boasting all sorts of new and improved features.

First and foremost is Party Play, which starts pretty much the instant you put the disk in. The main menu loads, and as per usual, there's a backing song from the game – but the backdrop for the main menu is an in-game band performing it. Tapping the yellow button on any controller at this point drops you straight into the song, at whatever point it was at, with no interruptions. Got three mates there with instruments aplenty? Then the four of you can drop in or out, swap difficulties and instruments, or even change the song with pretty much no delay. You can even mix and match the instruments as you like - if you want four drummers, then go right ahead, if you've got the kit for it.

Odd as it might sound, this is one of the biggest features in the title. The ability to jump into songs as soon as the game starts and to change songs, instruments, and difficulties on the fly, is a fantastic feature for a title that functions brilliantly as a party game, and it leaves Rock Band feeling surprisingly clunky.

Other, equally obvious improvements have been made right across the board. The graphics are toned down from the caricatures of the earlier Guitar Hero titles, lending a much more pleasing, pseudo-realistic air to the title. There's still a very different graphical feel to the Rock Band series, but Guitar Hero's new style means that the star appearances – ranging from Johnny Cash to Shirley Manson - feel more fitting when they turn up. The character customisation, too, is enhanced, with an almost silly amount of variables and options, letting you create pretty much whoever you want with whatever instrument you want.

All of that said, it's Career mode that contains the biggest changes outside of Party Play. While it functions roughly as you'd expect – a set of tiers divided into venues, each with a number of songs available – there are some new touches. Each venue is unlocked by achieving a certain number of stars, but you've always got a wealth of songs available. If you're any good, you'll unlock the second venue when you've still got a few songs to play in the first, meaning that you'll never really get stuck and be unable to progress. There's always something you can do to unlock a bit more content (for this mode; the songs are unlocked for Quickplay by default.)

Better than that, though, is the addition of challenges. Each song has an attached challenge, either for vocals, guitar, bass, drums, or band. Your success in the challenge is rewarded by Gold, Diamond, or Platinum, essentially making each song max out at eight stars rather than the traditional five (or five gold, if you're a Rock Band man.) While this would be a simple feat if the challenges were “get a high score,” or even the tougher “get a long streak,” when it's things like “whammy as many sustain notes as you can” or “get a high score during Star Power,” or “tap as many notes as you can” things get trickier and will often require a different approach to simply playing as normal. There are a wide variety of challenges and they keep things mixed up and interesting.

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