| Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock |
| Posted on 20th January 2008 by Scott McClymont |
Who hasn't played air guitar along to their favourite song? There's just something about it that adds to the experience of listening to the track – you feel more involved with it; you feel like you're as close to being in the band as you're ever gonna be. Problem is, it's just thin air, you're not making any noise. Well, you could sing along to it, right? A bit of karaoke? Except very few of us can pull that off with any dignity. There's always dancing? Except you're not a member of 'N Sync. If only you could air guitar, but with making an addition to the song as if you were singing it, and with a bit of physicality as if you were dancing. Enter Guitar Hero...
You remember those dance-mat games in the arcades or for your Playstation? Rhythm-action games they call them these days and this is one of those, except you don't have to dance around like a boy band singer and look just as ridiculous. For those unfamiliar with the game, here's the basic idea – you pick a song and a difficulty level and you have to play the notes in time to the music. The game comes with a scaled down guitar controller with 5 notes on the neck, a strummer, a whammy bar and some of the same buttons you'd see on a normal pad to help you get around the menus. The song plays and the notes come towards you, with the plan being you play them when they get to the bottom of the screen by holding the fret note on the neck and strumming. The more you hit cleanly, the more points you get and your score multiplier goes up from 1 eventually to 4; so you'll be scoring 4 times as much for each note until you miss one and drop back down to 1 again. Some sections of notes are marked as a star instead of a circle – nail a stream of those and you'll add to a Star Power meter, which you can activate when it gets high enough by tilting your guitar up vertically (or pressing the Back button, but where's the fun in that?). While activated, this doubles your multiplier, so you could be scoring up to 8 times the points for hitting notes if you use it at the right time. There's some other tricks you can use to hit notes closer together - hammer-ons and pull-offs - and you'll need to use them when things start to heat up. The game has a good but brief tutorial to get you into gear if you're a newcomer to the series but you'll get better as you play through the songs in the game.
If you're not a newcomer and have played one of the previous games, then there really isn't much new gameplay-wise. The graphics are crisper and a note streak counter appears on-screen when you're doing well, but aside from that it's nothing you won't have seen before. What is new is the co-op career mode where you and a friend (only locally though, not over Live) can take on the career part together with the bonus of some co-op exclusive songs, most of which would've been nice to see in the main part instead. Obviously two guitars are a good idea here, so if you can get another one second hand (or better yet, get Guitar Hero II and enjoy the songs on there too), or have a friend that can bring theirs round, then you're in for some fun times. You can use a regular Xbox 360 controller instead but it's really not suitable - particularly on harder levels - and really defeats the point of the game. It's still nice for players to have the choice though.
The main career mode is the same as always – you get several tiers with 4 song in each, and you have to complete 3 (2 on Easy) songs to progress to the next tier. After a few of the tiers you have to make it through a boss battle, which is basically the multiplayer battle mode (see below) against a celebrity guitar player on a specific song. This helps break up the tiers and gives you a little taste of the competitive multiplayer, even though it suffers from the same flaws that you see when you play against another person.
Once you've honed your skills in career mode, you'll then want to prove your skills against other real people, and this is where you'll head to the multiplayer mode. This you can do over Xbox Live, so you don't need another person beside you to play against. There's a choice of 3 different modes – Face-Off, Pro Face-Off or the new Battle Mode. Face-Off sees you and your opponent take turns to play different sections of a song, and each player can play at a different difficulty level if you so choose, which helps newcomers get involved and not be totally trampled by someone straight away. Pro Face-Off has both players playing the entire song at the same difficulty level and is good for a straight up "who's better" contest. The manual indicates this is only unlocked after completing career mode, however it seemed to be unlocked straight away – however this may be due to the game update that you'll have to download if you're connected to Xbox Live. Either way, it seemed to be an unlockable just for the sake of it, so it works out fine. Battle Mode features power ups instead of Star Power, where you can hinder your opponent with different obstacles such as breaking one of their strings - which they fix by tapping it repeatedly for a couple of seconds - upping their difficulty level for a few bars, or obscuring the screen temporarily. It's not a bad idea in theory, but it's generally either far too easy to make it to the end of the song or it's over within about 30 seconds. There's no nice middle ground to make for a to-and-fro contest, but it's certainly something that can be improved upon in a sequel.
OK, so what about the songs? There's a big selection in there, so there's bound to be something that you already like and will enjoy playing along to, but there's also plenty of obscure numbers that you won't have heard of and may or may not enjoy after hearing them. There's certainly more recent tracks than previous games (The Killers, Muse, The Strokes and Bloc Party all feature), but the older tracks are not quite as strong as in previous games. Compared to Guitar Hero II it's apples and oranges so have a look at the track listing for each before deciding which one would better suit you personally. Saying that, you do get the wireless guitar with this game and there are less cover versions overall. There's also the promise of more downloadable songs to add to the ones already available, but they're certainly not coming cheap, with the current rate being 500 Microsoft Points (approx. £4.25) for 3 songs.
A word of warning about the difficulty – this game is hard. Newcomers will be quite happy on easy for a while and medium is a decent step up from that to give you a better challenge. The problem is that the game is pretty unforgiving after that – hard is too hard and you'd possibly have to grow a third arm to get anywhere on expert. If you do manage to get good on those levels, then it would probably be more worthwhile making the transition to a real guitar rather than playing a game.
For the rest of us though, the game gives us the chance to play along to some cracking rock songs and look cool whilst doing so. It's enjoyable in single player and a good laugh in multiplayer. It's hard to see where Neversoft and Activision can go from here though, with Harmonix and EA's Rock Band taking the concept to the next, almost ridiculous, level. For now this is a great game, and definitely one to get if you've ever wanted to be a guitar legend in your own bedroom. |
Single Player Score: 7/10
Multiplayer Score: 8/10
Overall Score: 7/10 |
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