Giant Bomb Review
39 CommentsGuitar Hero 5 Review
4- PS3
- X360
by Ryan Davis on
Neversoft delivers a bubbly, slick-looking Guitar Hero game that benefits from big production values and a more accessible feel, and suffers from some questionable choices and a track list that lacks cohesion.
As the name implies, the Guitar Hero series has always put a premium on big, stadium-rattling rock songs, and despite the presence of drums and vocals, it seems like it's the fretted instruments that hold the most sway. You get 85 songs on the disc with Guitar Hero 5, and there are plenty of hard-rocking numbers in there from bands like Bon Jovi, Iron Maiden, Megadeth, The Rolling Stones, Smashing Pumpkins, and The White Stripes, among others. There's old stuff and there's new stuff, and a respectable portion of it is quite fun to play, but there are a number of songs that don't really agree with the game's rock-star attitude, like songs from Coldplay and Vampire Weekend, and some that just feel like filler. There just doesn't seem to be any real central vision to the song list. With all the licensing and audience considerations, I don't envy the task of trying to cook up a rhythm game song list that can be all things to all people. Still, Guitar Hero 5's approach to pleasing everyone meant that I found a handful of tracks that I really enjoyed playing, and a lot of material that I had little desire to revisit.
Comparatively, the series' glammy caricatured rock-n-roll fantasy aesthetic is intact and looking better than ever in Guitar Hero 5. The visuals in World Tour suffered from a certain mechanical blandness that seemed like a byproduct of the introduction of a character creator. While there are definitely some mannequin moments in GH5, everything is brimming with detail and color and movement. The shaky camera, the excess of colored light and smoke and pyro effects, and the increasingly ridiculous venues--which include an abandoned subway station, a boson reactor, and a barge beneath the Golden Gate Bridge--give the performances a terrific visceral punch. A lot of the character animation seems song-specific, which goes a long way to connecting the characters on your screen to the song that's being played. It even works pretty well when you're playing as your console avatar in the Xbox 360 version of the game.
The modes in Guitar Hero 5 are fairly predictable, though each has been tweaked in some meaningful ways. The career mode is still basically just a long list of songs that you chew your way through, though each song now has an instrument-specific challenge associated with it that can earn you new character costumes and other bonuses. These can be simple score challenges, or they can be far more specific, such as using an upstroke to hit a number of notes when playing bass. It would be nice if there were more variety to the challenges, but it's a clever way to test your skills and to get players to try instruments outside of their comfort zone.
There's something about the return to a standard numbering scheme for Guitar Hero 5 that suggests to me that this is, more than anything else, a commodity, a manufactured product, albeit a very attractive and energetic one. Neversoft seems more comfortable and confident than ever with this series it has inherited, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of passion behind the craft.
