Guitar Hero 5 Review

You can’t knock Neversoft for resting on its laurels. In what seems like the umpteenth GH title released this year, the company delivers yet more solid work. Guitar Hero 5 is clearly aimed at correcting some gripes shared by long-term fans of the series. 

Lots of legacy issues concerning the user interface have been fixed. There are now multiple tracklist sorting options. Signing in and out of multiplayer games in career mode is much easier. Most impressive is the new no-fail Party Play mode, which allows you to jump into a song from the title screen with the press of a button. From there, friends can jump in and out of multiplayer at will and can even change instruments on the fly. This emphasis on accessibility is mirrored in the Quickplay mode, which unlocks all 85 of the game’s songs from the get-go. In addition, all Guitar Hero: World Tour downloadable songs and (for a nominal fee) nearly all of the on-disc songs can be imported into GH 5, and will even work with the game’s new features. I think I speak for all Guitar Hero fans when I say, “It’s about damn time.”

On the gameplay side, there’s a host of new “Rockfest” multiplayer modes that, frankly, I found a lot more interesting in theory than in practice. They all have various ways of awarding scores and placement, but at the end of the day it all comes down to hitting the notes correctly. More compelling were the Bonus Challenges, which are included in every song in Career mode, with three levels of success (Gold, Platinum, and Diamond). Some of these might include whammying for a certain number of seconds, or scoring a certain number of points in Star Power. For experienced players, it adds another layer of competition to the game, and allows you to unlock a variety of in-game extras. You’ll also find enhancements to the online and GHTunes studio mode.

Even with this long list of new features, it’s Guitar Hero through and through, and at this point I doubt we’re ever going to see anything radically new from the series. For most fans, this game comes down to the tracklist, which is one of the strongest to date. From Dylan to Children of Bodom, it’s extremely diverse and for the most part well selected. The dumb plotlines of past games are cut out entirely, leaving only sponsorship challenges and in-game celebrity cameos to suffice as a loose narrative. 

However, forcing Johnny Cash to cavort around onstage with the now playable Live Avatars is just humiliating. (By the way, perhaps it would have been better to leave Kurt Cobain out of the game entirely if you were going to be so tacky as to allow players to have him jumping up and down like an idiot to a Blink 182 song as a playable character. Seriously gross.)

Guitar Hero 5 is a well-done sequel with high quality production values and a good feature set. If something seems, well, missing, I guess that’s just the natural passage of time. The music genre has been extremely successful, but I’m not sure the crazy days of 2007 are ever coming back. Come to think of it, at that last party I went to, no one even suggested playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band.