This game will rock living rooms for years. Its easy to pick up and play. All you need is hand-eye coordination (if you don't have that then you will enjoy the “you failed the song!” screen multiple times).
For those who have been living under a rock for 4 years and don't know what a “Guitar Hero” is then I will quickly explain: Playing Guitar Hero is like playing real guitar (without the marks on your finger from the strings). Basically you hold down buttons with your left hand and strum this plastic flipper thing with your right.
A simple system which feels real makes for lots of fun. The learning curve is also excellent. You go from Easy to Expert one step at a time. The wide range of songs will please a VERY large audience. You have nice old rock classics like “Welcome To The Jungle” by Guns ‘n’ Roses to “Raining Blood” by thrash metal legends Slayer.
What makes this game better is having friends to jam with. You can vs them in a duel by playing the same notes and seeing who gets the most points, playing co-op with them or playing the new but disappointing “Battle Mode” (I will get back to that later).
So, now your thinking “Gee, this is a real awesome game! it looks simple enough as it only requires button pushing and it looks like I will enjoy it for years because of the diverse selection of songs! It also helps that I have friends!” but its not all fun and games.
Like I said before, the battle mode was disappointing. Replacing the “Star Power” with “Attacks” was pointless and in cases where you are up against computer, impossible. In a “Battle” there are to sets of colours flying down. There are some sections that have different shaped colours. If you hit these you will be granted a power up. If you use this power up it will make the computer miss some notes. The famous icon that you have to face will hit EVERY note unless you use a power up. And since it usually gets power ups before you you will probably miss the colours that grant power ups and so on and so forth.
The co-op career has some problems as well. There a 4 difficulties in the career. Say you wanted to play “3s & 7s” (a song a bit later in the career) on Hard but you have only finished the co-op career on Medium, you have to play through the whole career just to be able to play that song on that difficulty. That means to unlock all the songs on all the difficulties you have to play through it 4 times.
More smaller niggles is that the the graphics -after 3 games- suck. The price is also a bit steep. Especially if you want an extra guitar controller to play the 2-player modes. But these bad things are still out ruled by the number of things the game did well. Like I said at the start of this review: It will rock living rooms for years.
Have fun playing Guitar Hero III