Roblog

So the Guitar Hero Van Halen promotional offer reeled me in (or, more accurately, reeled my father in — he really wants the Van Halen edition) and I bought the Guitar Hero 5 bundled with the latest Red Octane guitar.  I’ve had a chance to mess around with it a bit and thought I’d share my initial impressions.

First off, I love the new party mode.  Talk about getting into a game with no fuss!  Instead of a main menu, the latest Guitar Hero goes straight to loading up one of the songs from its library.  If you just want to start rocking out, simply grab an instrument, press the appropriate button, choose your difficulty and go.  Sounds normal in description, but the difference is the song has still been playing the entire time you’ve been setting yourself up.  When your friends have their acts together, they can join in at anytime without you having to stop the song to add them in.  If you didn’t like the difficulty you were playing, change it on the fly.  It doesn’t effect anyone else’s play.  If you happen to have more than the usual two guitars (’cause your buddy brought his axe over, too), play with three or even four guitarists.  It all works very smoothly and I think it’s an outstanding feature to add for those times when you just want to get some songs going and you don’t want to have to run an election to figure out which song everyone’s playing next.  In party mode, when the song’s over, it picks a new one randomly and just starts it right up (showing off everyone’s performance scores while it loads).  Pretty nifty.

The play is just like the previous Guitar Heros, though I could swear there are a lot more chords than the previous games.  Also there are now flaming note sections.  I don’t know what they’re for yet, but I assume they’re something like the band unison sections in Rock Band 2.  There are also interesting little challenges in the Career mode that go along with each song.  Things like upstrumming all of Gamma Ray on bass or trying to whammy the long notes as long as possible on In My Place.  Kinda fun.

The biggest drawback to the game has just been the lack of tunes that I have a great desire to play.  When I first threw it in and flipped to Quickplay (which has most or all of the songs unlocked by default thank you very much!), I was skipping over dozens of songs to find a single one that would be interesting.  I can’t recall anything (except maybe Song 2 or the Santana tune) that I really REALLY wanted to play.  That part was disappointing.  Neversoft did give us players the option of importing some (not all . . . boo) of the songs from World Tour.  It also requires a small licensing fee (like Rock Band), but at least it fleshes out the Guitar Hero 5 library a bit so you can play with the great features the latest edition of the franchise adds.

Oh, and on a side note the faux-sparkly red Fender knockoff guitar that came bundled with the game feels really nice.  It seems quieter than it’s World Tour brother and I like the soft grip they’ve added on the strum bar and directional knob.

All in all I still love these games and I can’t wait for The Beatles Rock Band tomorrow!

Rock on,

~R

Currently Playing: Guitar Hero 5