Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock

For those of you regular readers you’ll know that I’ve always favoured the Rock Band series of games. I love the sheer magnitude of DLC and the general band togetherness has always been much better. In recent months the Rock Band DLC has taken a spiral nose dive, much to my displeasure, when I noticed the new Guitar Hero game. Having previously been grossly disappointed with Guitar Hero 5, especially after watching an interview with the obsequious twonk of a developer who was getting excited about playing keyboard parts on the guitar, I never thought I’d go back to the Guitar Hero series for the foreseeable future. But then this came out and I changed my mind. Allow me to elaborate.

The tracklist from a first glance is good. Yeah sure there’s the obligatory boring tracks which don’t work from dull monotonous bands like Silverskin Pickups and Interpol, but in general the songs on the game are very good. This is what the guitar hero/rock band games are about, rock music! They seem to have cut down on the random spanish/french nonsense in favour of including more mainstream metal acts which will appeal to the average disciple of Guitar Hero. The songs range from stupidly easy to ridiculously hard and this adds depth to their selection.

The gameplay itself hasn’t changed too much but if anything is slightly more polished. You do notice that on hard/expert levels Guitar Hero like to victimise people who aren’t double jointed by constant combos involving swift chords on the blue and orange buttons but I suppose this is manageable but my claims that the rock band games are tabbed better still stands. It’s almost as if Neversoft felt it necessary to provide too much of a challenge to some people because the majority of the later songs on expert level are just impossible and I’d imagine only 1% of players would manage to finish the song, let alone get a good score. Plus the discrimination of the bass guitarist continues as they’ve left in the buttonless open strum purple bar, which in all honesty makes no sense still. Whereas Rock Band will reward the bass guitarist a 6x mulitplyer for good play, guitar hero is still rooted at a maximum 4x and gives the extra note. Still has no place.

The quest mode however is redeeming and in all honesty is excellent. You go through all the classic characters who’ve made appearances throughout the GH series and can turn them into “warriors of rock”, hence the name. This almost has an RPG feel about it and getting high scores on the songs will morph them into awesome warriors with different powers which enhance your playing experience. Powers include 6x multiplyers, double star powers and streak protectors. Purists will argue that this makes harder songs more accessible to weaker players but I think it was an excellent addition. Later on in the game you can combine all the powers making grinding through all the songs very rewarding and enjoyable. The only grind is that you’re expected to play through all the songs TWICE in order to get 100% completion, but when you’re achievement hunting, this is all worth is in the end.

The party modes and Quickplay+, and competitive modes all return from GH5 and this time make a welcome return making this iteration of Guitar Hero a great party game. The character creation is slightly improved but can’t ignore the fact that all the characters still look emaciated and gaunt, more akin to an Aeon Flux animation rather than trying to make them look like people, but since there’s more of an RPG approach, you can pass this off more like creating chracters for Fable 2.

The only hugedown side is the adding of content. While it doesn’t have the DLC of rock band, it does have a large game library of which you can import the songs. They make you put the code from the back of the previous game manuals in as proof of purchase, but then ask you to part with money to download the songs. But I’ve already bought GH:Metallica and GH:World Tour. Why should I PAY for those songs on this game? I wanted to play the songs badly so I uploaded both discs into my port of GH:WoR only to find half the songs (mostly the decent songs) haven’t ported into the new game. So let me get this straight, I PAY for the songs to be imported and half of them can’t copy? It’s a rip off but I only noticed after I finished it.

All in all GH:WoR is a very good game and it feels like Activision/Neversoft are finally taking the competition from Rock Band seriously as you can tell from the song selection screens and band bonuses. I do recommend this but I’m still waiting for the release of Rock Band 3 later this month.