Guitar Hero 5 Review

By Jeremy Azevedo

For people that have been playing Guitar Hero games for several years now, there is undoubtedly a feeling of “Tony Hawk Syndrome” creeping in by now. How many times can you experience a variation on the same theme without eventually growing tired of the entire concept?

Lucky for us, Neversoft was playing close attention to the way people actually play music games, and the resulting tweaks make Guitar Hero 5 the most enjoyable rhythm action game on the market. Nearly every complaint I’ve personally had with the series has been addressed here. For starters, the entire set list is available from the start. No unlocking or cheat codes are necessary for those who play the game solely at parties and have little to no interest in playing alone. Additionally, the currency system has been done away with, instead replaced with a challenge system that offers players more incentive to play through the career mode alone or with friends. This way, new characters, outfits, etc. can be earned instead of bought. Now you can watch Courtney Love dig up Kurt Cobain’s corpse and desecrate it by making him rap to “Feel Good Inc.” without having to slog through the single player mode for hours first!

Actually, to be fair, the single player mode isn’t much of a “slog” at all anymore. The career mode has been massively overhauled to allow you to switch instruments and/or difficulty, jump other players in and out and tackle the aforementioned challenges at your leisure. It’s an awesome way to get you to experience many of the songs in ways that you normally wouldn’t, i.e. switching to vocals or bass guitar when you normally wouldn’t have dreamed of doing so. Some of the challenges even require a full band, again adding to the incentive to play the career mode with friends. Perhaps best of all, the streamlined new menu system shows you little entries for each song that outline why each individual song is an important piece of rock history or at least has the potential to one day become one. It’s a great way to familiarize oneself with some of the more far-out songs, and it’s a wonder why this feature wasn’t always present!

The multiplayer mode is equally improved from its predecessors in nearly every way. First of all, you can’t really fail out of songs, which was a major problem when playing with n00bs in previous editions of the game. In Party Play mode, for instance, you can jump in and out of the song, changed instruments or difficulty, go to the fridge for another beer or do pretty much whatever you want without disrupting the other players in any way. The game doesn’t even pause for them. It’s awesome. The ability to play whatever instrument you want, whenever and however you want makes GH5 so much easier to approach, while still remaining competitive for experienced players. If you’ve ever been stuck playing bass while some hot shot hogs the guitar parts, you’ll be happy to know that those days are over. You can even have two drummers, or two singers if you want. You’re really only limited by the amount of plastic instruments that you have and, if you are at a party, the amount of songs that girls know the words to. (The girls always want to sing for some reason, but only ever know like five of the songs.)

For those of you that enjoyed the GHStudio mod in World Tour, you’ll be happy to know that the entire process has been streamlined from top to bottom, with a completely different and way more effective user interface that will make song creation significantly easier, and hopefully encourage more original material to appear on the download service as a result. Another thing worth noting for World Tour veterans is that you can upload about 35 or so songs from that game into GH5 for a tiny re-licensing fee of 280 MS Points, or about $3 in genuine American dollars. All of your previously downloaded songs carry over for free, save for a couple of Jimi Hendrix tracks if I’m not mistaken. This really ups the amount of songs that you have to play with and eliminates the need to swap discs, which has been an annoying hold out for the series up until now. Rock Band has very little to brag about in terms of features at this point, unless you really enjoy spending a shit-ton more money on DLC, something I’m not particularly fond of m’self.