Review: Guitar Hero 5 - Stones versus The Beatles

Mike Bantick
Sunday, 20 September 2009 05:21

Entertainment

Career mode has been tweaked, rather than playing a set gig list to unlock more songs in subsequent gigs, players can select songs at a venue with the aim of earning enough stars to unlock the next venue.  There are fourteen – nicely over the top – venues in total.

Stars are performance based; doing away with previous Guitar Heroes focus on money earned.  Each song can earn five stars, but also has a challenge associated with it for further bonus stars. 

At the beginning of each song, players are presented with a nice little blurb about the band or song along with the specific challenge ahead.  This challenge may need a specific instrument to succeed, such as hitting a high note as a singer, racking up a drum beat sequence keeping that ever important multiplier at 4X for as long as possible, or simply racking up a high score.  Three more stars can be earned this way.

On the visuals, Neversoft has cleaned up the interface to individualise each instrument with its own Rock Meter and slightly tweaked the look of the notes.  Initiating ‘Star Power’ will take a little getting used to as an obscuring twin flash of blue moves horizontally across the note track.

Your on screen band avatars are now even more ‘into’ each track, and I will admit to missing a few notes as my attention was drawn to how well the singer(s) lip synced each track.  Even more than before, the background band presentation fits in with experience, with strobing during drumming sections and a camera that, whilst still getting amongst the action, is more traditional to the reality of a concert.  So far I have not seen the annoying guitar fret camera as presented in World Tour.

Whilst I haven’t had too much chance to fiddle with the redesigned music studio for editing your own tunes, others have cited a new level of ease to the song creation aspect of Guitar Hero.  The new GH Jam is a nice light way to rock-out and experiment with your own sounds in prepared genres.

Which leads us into discussing the all important song list; eighty five come on the disc, with GH5 recognising previously downloaded songs immediately.  Owners of GHWT or Greatest Hits can also download selected songs from these games to boost the GH5 stable.  I don’t know about ‘Greatest Hits’ but the WT code granted me (for the cost of AU$6.95) 35 songs from the game, not the ones I would have chosen unfortunately.

The on-disc song list is again an eclectic mix of age, genre and style.  As usual there will be songs here people will have different feelings for, which makes the ‘Career’ structure and the ‘all songs unlocked from the start’ decisions so important.

The full list can be scanned here , but some highlights include Nirvana’s (including Cobain) “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, Screaming Trees “Nearly Lost You”, The Police “ So Lonely” and Spacehog with “In The Meantime”.  But throw in everything from Thin Lizzy to Kaiser Chiefs with John Mellencamp, The Rolling Stones and The Eagles of Death Metal along the way.

Plinking away to Bob Dylan’s original “All Along The Watchtower” made me long for the electric Jimi Hendrix version, whilst paying Guitar to the horn section of Stevie Wonders classic Superstition was just a little weird.

Neversoft have heeded the cries of adoring fans, the Party Play Mode in particular is very welcome.  But it will be an individual call as to whether these features warrant the additional purchase for GH:WT owners in particular.


8.5 Peter Frampton’s out of 10