I don’t know what it is about Guitar Hero that makes it my personal Pokemon. Gotta play them all kind of thing… Ok, ok, bad analogy, but I’m sure if you’re a fan of the game you know exactly what I mean. I love discovering new favorite songs and learn about new game features with every installment of the series, and this time was no different.
Guitar Hero 5 is essentially the same Guitar Hero. Essentially, because the format is quite different. I’m not going to get into the basics of how to play each instrument, sorry, so I’m jumping right into the meat of the game.
First, GH5 begins with a stage sequence where you can choose to jump right in and play, or go to the menus and play whatever mode you feel like exploring. The basic single-player and multiplayer options remain – Quickplay, Career, Music Editor, Xbox Live matches – but the biggest difference is Party Play, a mode that makes Guitar Hero more user-friendly for any player of any skill level.
Party Play lets up to four users play together regardless of instrument restriction. You aren’t limited to one of each instrument anymore, which is great, you can have bands with all guitars, two singers, bass and drums, or any other possible combination you can put together, which definitely encourages the multiplayer aspect of the game. Party Play also lets players jump in and out of the game whenever they feel like without affecting gameplay for others.
Similar to Rock Band, there is a different “revival” feature for failing band members involving a crowd pleasing meter: play well for long enough, and your band member can come back to the game. This means you don’t need to keep saving your Star Power for these occasions anymore.
As for a few other handy multiplayer features, excess Star Power now flows to other players when your meter is full, and games are easily customizable through a single hub where you can change everything from character to game mode, instrument and difficulty.
Career is definitely where the challenge is. Venue progression rules still apply, but you don’t have to play all songs in a venue to unlock the next, as this is done by accumulating stars. You are awarded up to 6 stars depending on your song performance (6 stars for 100% of notes hit) but there is a challenge for each song which can give you extra stars. Each challenge has three levels – Gold, Diamond and Platinum – and must be completed on the instrument indicated in the description or in some cases, the whole band must meet those requirements. Challenges are quite interesting and range from maintaining a 4x multiplier for as long as you can to playing an entire song alternating strumming up and down, hitting all green notes in the drums or singing a number of perfect phrases. So technically, there are 9 possible stars to earn per song: 5 stars for a great performance, 6 stars for 100%, and one star per challenge level. There is a lot to work on here, considering the 85 tracks, and some of these will have you pull your hair out unless you’re an Expert player.
As you progress, you will notice you are no longer awarded money. Playing gigs and completing challenges unlocks items and instruments to use in Create-A-Rocker, gives you access to star characters that you can use in your band (Johnny Cash, Kurt Cobain, Carlos Santana, Shirley Manson), and you can even use your XBL Avatar as your rocker or create new ones.
Now, aside from the fact that singers can no longer tap the microphone to use Star Power – they must physically press the button on the controller to do so – there is one more thing that I must complain about.
When I first learned that you could import songs from other GH titles into GH5, I thought “Well, about time, why couldn’t they think of this sooner?”. But as cool as this sounds, the feature doesn’t really work as intended. All DLC songs that you have can be imported into the game (except Hendrix’s songs), but only 35 tracks from World Tour (and supposedly 21 from Smash Hits) can be ported over for free. Yes people, for free. Because for the rest of the songs, even if you have already purchased the games and shelled out the big bucks to play them, you still have to spend 280 Microsoft Points to download a file that lets you import the rest of the tracks. Although it’s said that this solution is temporary, and more tracks will become available later on. I’ll just wait for them to become free, and in the meantime keep my pile of GHs handy so I can swap discs and play whatever I feel like.
But overall, and imported tracks “issue” aside, Guitar Hero 5 is fun, challenging, engaging, it lets everyone play together easily and makes the entire experience a lot more user-friendly.
Special thanks to Jordan Dodge, Karen Fujimoto and Activision for providing a copy of this title.