The easier difficulties don’t throw out too many notes at a time and give you plenty of resting areas so that you can absorb the next sequence of notes without being overwhelmed, while Expert will throw even veteran Guitar Hero players (like myself) into a frenzy trying to keep up with the steady stream of chords and complicated fingering, not to mention the use of hero power (or star power) and those insane solos that ask you to glide through both rows of buttons like butter.
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Other new twists include a GHTV online video network lets you play the game to music videos and compete online with others for top scores (you have to have your game system connected to the Net to play). Oddly enough, being a rock troll was just as entertaining as being a rock god.
Wait, what was I talking about? Yes, you can connect a second guitar and use your phone as a makeshift mic for vocals, but there is no option for a multiplayer career, and elsewhere the second guitar track is always identical to the first. There are two of them now, back after a five-year hiatus following what many will remember as a flooding of the market with absolute tosh. In the latest war of the plastic guitars, Guitar Hero Live faces off against Rock Band 4 with something radically different.
Earlier this month, the arrival of Rock Band 4 kicked off the music game revival. The last time anyone had seen Activision‘s Guitar Hero, the series had flown too close to the sun and its wings melted under the intense heat of gimmicks and monster makeup. While the reasons for its comeback are likely to be as much about tapping the nostalgia of fans as they are about making a great game, the fact is, Activision and developer Freestyle Games (of DJ Hero fame) have made a great game.
“Guitar Hero Live’s reinvented mechanics makes music-driven gameplay fresh and fun again, and while that’s a truly massive and meaningful change for the genre as a whole, the campaign’s off-putting presentation and GHTV’s unpleasant microtransactions all sour the experience built up around that gameplay”.
The other draw for Guitar Hero Live is the sheer technological prowess between the realistic on-stage experience in the eponymous Live mode and the music video streaming in RPG-like Guitar Hero TV mode. FreeStyleGames has taken only the most fundamental pieces of what Harmonix and Neversoft introduced and instead put their own unique stamp on Guitar Hero Live. They’re no longer colour-coded in the same way and now have a six-button layout, divided into two rows of three. There’s even a nice wood-grain effect on them that looks decidedly grown up-or as grown up as can be for what is essentially a sophisticated Fisher Price toy. From the new guitar controller to the live streaming service, everything about it feels fresh, akin to discovering your new favourite album from a band you’d never heard of. Those with a lighter touch will continue to struggle.
Spreading the six buttons across two rows is a smart move. When you factor in notes that use multiple button presses and the new power chords (holding blacks and white notes in the same column) the difficulty starts to ramp up.
Not that it really matters how much the game apes a real guitar. On easier difficulty settings, players must only tap the bottom buttons in time with the music. Everyone wins. There’s still no way to slow down tracks on advanced levels to practice them, though. In my estimation, the advent of both Live mode and GHTV would have elevated the base experience enough that the original five-button guitar would have worked just fine. Guitar Hero Live, while not quite giving me a one for one representation of that feeling, did manage to give me at least part of it, which I absolutely loved. Seeing the rightmost note – either upper or lower – made me instinctively reach my pinky down more often that I want to admit. Maybe I’ll finally get my wish in the next one.
A Guitar Hero Live companion app also turns your iPhone or other iOS device into a microphone so you can sing along to the console game. Play poorly and the screen blurs briefly, transitioning to the negative video. Locked content, particularly for a game like this, is an odd throwback to ye olde gaming days of yore. Acting as the story mode of sorts, Live mode pits you in the first-person role of a guitarist who is about to head on stage with one of the game’s many fictional bands in two fictional music festivals, with the caveat being that these bands are comprised of actual musicians and the music festivals are filled with a live audience.
It’s an awesome sight to see especially the tutorial that has you talking to the stage manager as he talks you through the controls.
That said, despite how good the game looks thanks to 4K Red cameras and some digital lighting trickery by Framestore (the Oscar-winning VFX house behind the likes of Gravity, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Edge of Tomorrow), there are a few niggles. Ostensibly, the theme behind Live is “stage fright”, except no one seems all that frightened about going on stage-and the less said about a few of the pre-show pep talk the better. While the bands do look like they could be real bands, the reality is that they’re still mere caricatures: the emo band has its skinny black jeans and hoodies; the indie band has its flannel shirts; and the folk band has its billowy dresses, waistcoats, and mandolins. In terms of gameplay, it’s a simple “pick-up-and-play” atmosphere.
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Unlike Spotify or Pandora, there is no way to like or favorite a song to go back and play it later. “Although naysayers will lament the lack of more instruments or complain about the non-permanence of extra songs, for many, Live will become the quintessential party game and is already set to be a permanent fixture in my sitting room”.
