Reviewed: November 13, 2007
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
RedOctane
Activision

Developer
Neversoft

Released: October 28, 2007
Genre: Music
Players: 1-2

8
8
8
9
8.2

Supported Features:

Harmonix, the original developers of Guitar Hero were snatched up by MTV and put to work on the upcoming Rock Band game – a Guitar Hero clone that adds drums and vocals – so Neversoft, creators of the Tony Hawk franchise and huge fans of Guitar Hero, stepped up to redesign the game from scratch. While they could replicate the look and style of the game, they were challenged with creating all new source code, and in doing so they made a few visual and gameplay changes that you may or may not like.

This new controller is completely redesigned with a simple wireless channel setup that gives you the freedom to rock without being tethered to your console. Swappable faceplates provide maximum customization and huge marketing possibilities for add-on sales, and the breakaway neck allows for easier transportation when you go on tour. Stylized Start and Back buttons and a new extended strum bar design will have you blasting out the hits, and the auto sleep mode will save battery power (2 AA’s included) for extended jam sessions.

The new Les Paul guitar doesn't stray too far from the original Gibson we all came to love in the first two Guitar Heroes on the PS2. The guitar also has some serious substance with a greater weight and solid construction. My only minor complaint is that the detachable neck has a bit of play, even when locked in, but not enough to make the frets lose connection.

You will find that you do have to really mash down on the frets, as there is a lot of play in the buttons before they actually register. This is probably a good thing in that you won’t be accidentally hitting notes as you move your fingers across the buttons, but it also makes it far too easy to prematurely release a button during a long note if you relax your finger.

Neversoft really didn’t need to improve on the existing game design and to their credit they didn’t screw it up by trying. What they did do was offer a new visual style, new HUD, a story mode with artistic cutscenes, and the much-anticipated Co-op Career mode, complete with its own story and exclusive songs. There is also a new Battle mode that has to be experienced to fully appreciate. Don’t have a friend? You can now play the multiplayer modes online. Cool!

There are more than 70 music tracks for Guitar Hero III, many from independent bands, and other songs performed by cover bands that can easily be mistaken for the original artist. Guitar Hero III marks the first game where actual artists were used for several key songs. They were either brought into the studio to rerecord the song or, as in the case of the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black”, they actually got the 1966 2-track master and remixed it for the game.

Authentic music isn’t the only new feature. Expect to see a few famous rock legends appear in the game, fully mo-capped and animated in game. The Sex Pistols re-entered the studio for the first time in 30 years to re-record “Anarchy in the U.K.” providing Guitar Hero III with an original recording not available anywhere else. They even have unlockable movies where you can watch Slash, Bret Michaels, and Tom Morello performing in the mo-cap suit and an interview with The Sex Pistols.

As with the previous Guitar Hero II game there are two of three possible guitar tracks (Lead, Rhythm, and Bass) for each song, effectively doubling the gameplay right out of the box, although you can only access the non-lead guitar in practice mode or multiplayer.

Of course the first order of business is to unlock that massive song list. You’ll need to create a band and go on tour to unlock the rest of the sets, encore songs, and earn enough money to purchase the vast library of bonus songs in the Guitar Hero Store, along with new guitars, skins, characters, costumes, and some cool behind-the-scenes videos.

Multiplayer modes include the old standbys; Face-off mode where you trade off on parts of the lead track, or Pro Face-off where you each play the full lead track. We tried all these modes but ultimately agreed the Cooperative Career was the most fun and rewarding, plus you get access to songs you can’t play in the solo career. There is also the added challenge in co-op play in that you have to work together to build and initiate Star Power by tipping your guitars at the same time.

Also returning from Guitar Hero II is the Practice mode where you can pick your song, skill level, the guitar track you want to practice, and then go as far as to pick the section of the song (intro, verse, chorus) or just play the whole song. Finally, you get to pick your practice speed, which really saves your bacon when you are trying to learn “Through the Fire and Flames on Expert. Choose from Slowest, Slower, Slow, and Full speed as you gradually increase the flow of notes and master the song.

The Career and Co-op Career modes are where you will need to spend much of your time, at least until you unlock everything and earn enough bank to buy the rest. There are fewer sets in this year’s game (6 versus 8) and when you meet the requirements to end each set the crowd will demand an encore. You are free to decline, but you’ll miss a lot of extra cash and several of the best songs in the game. Plus, earning five stars on the encore songs unlocks bonus guitars in the store.

Guitar Hero III also introduces the new Battle Mode, a competitive mode between two players either locally or online. The mode puts a twist on the Pro Face-off mode introduced in Guitar Hero II by replacing Star Power notes with Attack Notes. Two players will face each other, trying to complete a song while successfully playing these battle sequences to earn attacks that can be used against their opponents. Players will be able to store three attacks at a time and can activate them by tilting their guitars upward, but the attacks are only temporary. If neither player fails the song, they will face each other in a Sudden Death segment.

The attacks include:

• Broken string: One fret button on the opponent's guitar will not work until it is fixed (by rapidly tapping the button).
• Difficulty up: The opponent will play the song on an increased difficulty for a short duration of time (except for expert difficulty).
• Amp overload: The fret board will shake and cause the notes to blink, making the scrolling notes difficult to read.
• Whammy bar: The opponent will have to use the whammy bar repeatedly before he/she can play notes again.
• Steal power: This will steal your opponent's power-up (this will be lost if used when the opponent has no power-up).
• Double notes: The opponent will have to play any single note as a two-button chord, and any two-button chord as a three-button chord for a short amount of time.
• Lefty/Righty flip: The fret board will be mirrored, requiring the attacked player to change his or her handedness.
• Death Drain: After the players go into Sudden Death mode. The song you just played is restarted. All Battle Powers appearing on the fret board turn into unstoppable Death Drain attacks. When Death Drain is unleashed upon the opponent, a figure resembling a winged Grim Reaper will appear and have a constant negative influence on his or her opponent's rock meter. Every mistake the player makes will add to their rock meter drain, and eventually the Grim Reaper image will block the player's view of the frets and thus the player will fail, since their Rock Meter will be put past the failing red range. To win, your opponent must fail before you.

The core gameplay is straight from the original Guitar Hero. Colored “notes” stream down the neck of the on-screen guitar and you must hold the corresponding fret and strum as these notes pass through the circle. As the difficulty level rises and you go deeper into the career song selection, there are many more notes, often in chords (2-3 buttons at the same time) and they move a lot faster. By hitting subsequent notes you earn combo multipliers and special star notes build up your Star Power that you can unleash to double your current multipliers and boost your Rock meter in times of need.

One thing I noticed for Guitar Hero III was an abundance of rapid streams of the same colored note or chord of notes. It got really annoying, almost turning the game into an endurance test. The game actually became physically painful at times, plus the notes were often off-beat and even worse, some songs had the Star Power notes only in these lengthy streams, and if you missed just one note in the stream you would never get any Star Power. Several of my favorite songs in the game were ruined with poor note patterns.

Neversoft has chosen to give gamers a slightly larger window of opportunity to hit their notes, but this in no way makes the game too easy since they balance this larger window with the aforementioned note streams as well as demanding multi-color sequences that require fluid hammer-ons and pull-offs. If you haven’t learned these advanced techniques by now you’re going to be in for a tough time.

Guitar Hero III has a cast of 13 rockers. Returning from previous titles are Johnny Napalm, Judy Nails, Axel Steel, Izzy Sparks, Casey Lynch, Lars Ümlaüt, and Xavier Stone. Midori is an original playable character that can be selected; additionally, each system has two additional playable characters that can be unlocked: the Wii and PS2 versions include the characters of Metalhead and Elroy Budvis, while the 360 and PS3 versions include The God of Rock and The Grim Ripper.

In addition, the player can unlock the three boss characters: Tom Morello, Slash, and Lou the Devil, once they have completed their respective boss battles in career mode. While Bret Michaels appears in the game and sings specific songs, he is not a playable character in the game, and is only included in the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game.

As far as locations, Guitar Hero III has some original venues that fit with the theme of a rising rock band. You’ll start off playing at a backyard party then slowly make the tour as a lounge band, play at a prison, go international in Japan, and even test your skills in the fiery pits of Hell…sorta. Here is a complete list of venues:

• Backyard Bash - a suburban barbecue party-styled venue.
• Mitch's Moose Lounge - a strip bar-like venue.
• Video Shoot - a venue where a video of your band playing is being recorded. The background consists of a cenographic truck in front of chroma-key screens where scenes of road landscapes zoom by.
• Ye Olde Royal Odeon - An original theater-like venue, complete with a medieval theme, located in London, United Kingdom.
• Shanker's Island - a gloomy, prison-like venue, derived from the slang word for the sharp, jail inmate-favored weapon. The island itself is reminiscent of real-life Alcatraz.
• Desert Rock Tour - a large rock concert venue, held at night in a Death Valley-like desert canyon, apparently referencing the Burning Man Festival (though the figure on the stage is made out of neon lights).
• Kaiju Megadome - a large arena venue located in Japan, complete with commercial posters, paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling, and a volcano in the background. Possibly a reference to the Nippon Budokan Hall.
• Lou's Inferno - a Hell-like venue, whose name may be a homage to the first canticle of the famous Christian poem The Divine Comedy.

If you like to study stats, you can now view a massively detailed report card of your previous performance that shows your success rate during all parts of the song. It's impressive that they can do this but I found no real use for the information other than to know where I choked.

The cutscenes are all cel-shaded storyboards, almost like a Flash animation, with no speech, just sounds and mime-like motions. It’s pretty amusing watching the exaggerated antics of your band as they gain fame and popularity.

There is some detailed character design, and smooth animation. The lighting, special effects, and cinematic camera angles, including some nice handheld camera shots as well as those new suspended wire-cams that fly in over the crowd and appear to rush the stage. It all blends together to create a perfect night at a club, prison, or concert arena.

The pyrotechnics complete with particle effects and billowing smoke machine vapors is second only to the giant stage props that animate and become part of the show, especially prior to an encore. Star Power erupts with awesome stage antics and thunderous crowd reactions, and there are wide shots of the crowd dancing and waving lighters

Unfortunately, you can't really enjoy the scenery since you’ll have to keep your eyes on the thousands of notes streaming down the neck of your guitar, so you probably won’t get to enjoy the stage show as much as the person sitting next to you waiting for their turn with the guitar, but at least you can pick your guitar and even skin it with fresh designs that you can purchase in the store. As with the previous game, you can change costumes for any of your rockers once you have purchased their alternate outfits.

This latest Guitar Hero game supports native 720p, which obviously isn't quite as nice as the 1080p version on the 360, but untrained eyes won't even be able to tell. And in case you are suffering from audio-visual lag when running in hi-def, or just lag from the funky 2.4 GHz controller, there is a built-in calibration utility that will smooth things out for you.

I am also not a big fan of the audio treatment of Star Power for this release. The effect is way too much. The song volume increases significantly and everything gets all hollow with exaggerated reverb effects. You can only hear the clapping of the crowd if you happen to hit Star Power during a no-note sequence of the song. It's even more jolting when you go back to normal play. The drop in volume and echo is quite distracting.

Of course what you all really want to know is the song list. While Guitar Hero III offered some amazing new songs it also had the largest selection of songs I had either never heard of or just plain didn’t like. Naturally, music is a subjective issue and tastes will differ, but I know what I like and I didn’t like more than half the music in this game.

Single-Player Career Set List (Songs performed by original artists show in italics)

1. Starting Out Small

Guitar Battle vs. Lou (The Devil Went Down to Georgia - Steve Ouimette)
Note: When the Boss Battle Composition Pack is downloaded, the three songs used in Tom Morello, Slash, and Lou's in-game boss battles are available in Quick Play, multiplayer and online multiplayer modes, and Training Mode, not just in Career Mode.

Sadly, some songs were required to be censored in order to keep the 'Teen' rating on Guitar Hero III, even on master tracks. These songs include:

• “Holiday in Cambodia" – Dead Kennedys
• “In the Belly of a Shark" – Gallows
• “Sabotage" – Beastie Boys
• “Bulls on Parade" – Rage Against the Machine
• “Rock You Like a Hurricane" – Scorpions
• “Suck My Kiss" – Red Hot Chili Peppers
• “The Devil Went Down to Georgia" – Steve Ouimette's rendition
• “Generation Rock" – Revolverheld

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It took me about two days of casual gaming to complete all the tracks (including bonus tracks) on Medium, or about 5 hours. I normally settle for nothing less than 5-star rankings on Medium but with the aforementioned repetitious note streams and some other issues I’m happy to get four or even three stars on a few of the songs. I then went through the career on Easy in about 3 hours and got 5-stars on everything, usually on my first attempt. I’m now dabbling with a few songs on the Hard skill level and my few attempts at anything in the first set on Expert were disastrous.

Just in time for this review, I was able to get the entire Co-op career completed on Medium. This took about 3 hours and was easily the most fun I’ve had with the game since it arrived. Having already played the lead guitar on a lot of the songs I was able to explore the alternate bass and rhythm tracks, and some songs were entirely new and exclusive to the co-op career.

Mastering Guitar Hero III will take months, years, possibly never, but at least we have a practice mode to help us learn. Some of the chords and patterns on the Hard level tie my fingers into knots a sailor would be proud of. I can’t imagine casting my eyes on the awesomeness of Expert mode, or even watching somebody else do it, and anybody who does figure it out…well…we all know how that turned out on South Park last week.

So, expect 3-4 hours to unlock the content (on medium) and another 3-4 hours for co-op and endless replay in Battle Mode online or off, and then you have the endless quest of perfecting all the songs on all the skill levels – a feat that could very well take a lifetime.

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Whoever said, “the third time’s a charm” obviously wasn’t talking about Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. While the game has seen several key improvements in game modes and controllers, I found more than half of the songs simply not that much fun to play, and even many of my favorites songs (Welcome to the Jungle, Rock You Like a Hurricane) suffered from poor and repetitive note designs.

Admittedly, musical taste is subjective and for every song I didn’t like there are hundreds who were probably petitioning to get that song included. I’ve never heard of Killswitch Engage but I know at least two people who bought this game just because of that song, and it’s not even in the core set list…it’s a bonus track.

As far as differences between the various systems, aside from a few exclusive characters there were no exclusive tracks. This was definitely a missed opportunity because I guarantee you could have gotten gamers to buy multiple formats if you had certain songs on certain systems.

Regardless of my opinion (which sort of negates the necessity of this review), Guitar Hero III will be huge. It’s already been out for over a week and is sold out at nearly every store for every format. The Wii version is harder to find than an actual Wii. There are hundreds of thousands of people already ranked online and you can always find somebody to play with at anytime of day or night.

Neversoft did an admirable job, especially considering they had to take a legendary franchise and rebuild it from scratch. But for a series that I have traditionally given perfect scores and continuous editorial awards, I can’t help but feel a bit let down by some personally distasteful music and poor note designs. But that’s just my opinion…and sales figures are already proving me wrong, so stop reading and go rock out.