Reviewed: Guitar Hero III
Reviewed: Guitar Hero III
Are you ready to rock? I saiiiid, are you READY TO ROCK?
Sorry, I’ve always wanted to be able to scream that blindly at a crowd of people and not have things thrown at me as a result. With my purchase of Guitar Hero III, that seems to be the case. Now, I want to take a moment to express that I’ve never played Guitar Hero I or Guitar Hero II, so I can’t make any comparisons between the three games. So, this review comes from me playing the game with absolutely no experience with the series at all.
Radical.
After spending weeks trying to get my hands on one (without having to resort to buying it from some lowlife scalper) my girlfriend finally found six copies of Guitar Hero III, for the Wii (of course), in stock at a local video games store. I rushed down to the store and, after braving a massive boxing week sale line, got two copies (for two guitars, duh).
Oh how sweet it is.
Initial Impressions and Musings
The whole “guitar hero” thing never really appealed to me when the first two games were released. They looked like fun games, but I wasn’t a fan of DDR (Dance-Dance-Revolution) and I figured that Guitar Hero followed in DDR’s footsteps. Apparently I had decided that strumming on a fake plastic guitar was the same as hopping around on a plastic mat on the floor. Anyway, with the release of the third Guitar Hero I finally decided to bite the bullet and buy the game.
Once I got it home and got it all set up I noticed a few things.
- The guitar is different from all of the other guitars. For the Wii you actually place the Wiimote inside of the guitar, meaning that you don’t have to buy any batteries or anything like that. Since I have a rechargeable battery pack (read my review of the “Phantiq Wiimote Rechargable Battery Pack“) I really liked this design choice. No more batteries to buy once you’ve got Guitar Hero III- just plug in your Wiimote and enjoy.
- This game kicks ass. It’s bloody amazing, and I am kicking myself for not getting into it earlier.
Right from the get-go you can get into a single-player career mode, or play multiplayer with a friend (either cooperative career mode or “battle mode”, where two players duel the same song and launch guitar-themed attacks at each other). Since I had two guitars, and my girlfriend lives with me, we decided to jam together in cooperative career mode.
As you play along and strum the notes your virtual guitarist (a character that you can pick to be in-game) will play on the screen. If you stop strumming (or start making mistakes) the guitar portion of the song stops or makes a “twang” sound, while the background music and drums continue to roll on.
Now, I can’t actually write this review without saying (at least once) that your wrists will get sore for the first little while that you play it. But, after the eighth or ninth hour your wrists kind of go numb and then it’s no longer an issue.
Career Mode: Single Player and Cooperative
Both my girlfriend and decided to play on the “easy” setting, and after choosing our characters and their respective outfits, we got to playing. The first song, “Slow Ride”, was just that- a slow, easy song that introduces the basics of Guitar Hero to anyone who’s never played it before. After six or seven attempts we finally beat it and moved on to the next song.
What’s really cool about the Wii version of this game is that every time you mess up you hear a “twang” come from the Wiimote, making the experience that much more realistic.
We continued to play and eventually we beat 3 of the 4 starting songs, allowing us to play an “Encore”. We did, we rocked it, and we took a break for a whole (to ice our wrists and to celebrate or awesomeness as rock stars). We continued down this path, only using the first three (or five) fret buttons as that’s all we can use on easy. Eventually we rocked so hard that it was time to graduate to medium- this is where it begins to get difficult.
Easy is just that- easy. The songs are slower-paced, there’s only three buttons to worry about, and generally there are no combo’s or key-combinations that are hard to deal with. But on medium the difference is really night and day. That fourth button, combined with a faster tempo and harder key-combinations, really ups the ante in a good way. For someone who wants to feel like an actual guitarist, jamming along and medium or hard is perfect- you get a good tempo, plenty of keys to hit, and a satisfaction of knowing that you really do rock after nailing down the awesome guitar solo in “One” by Metallica.
Single player is even more fun than cooperative career play, as you get to “battle” with Tom Morello (from Rage Against the Machine) and Slash (from Guns’n'Roses), and at the end you unlock a song or two. It’s a great experience no matter what difficulty you set it at, though I recommend at least medium for maximum rockage.
Two Player “Battle Mode”
At first I had mixed feelings about this. The premise seems alright- you duel over a song, earning power-ups that you can unleash upon your opponent and vise versa, but I never really enjoyed it as much as I did the cooperative career mode. Perhaps it’s just me, but I’m much happier “jamming” with a friend of mine than trying to ruin their whammy bar or cut one of their guitar strings.
But, that being said, for those that enjoy competition this is the perfect way to truly show who the true guitar hero is.
Replayability and the “Fun Factor”
I love this game. I love the fact that I can jam to over 60 songs (42 in the standard track list + what you unlock in career mode + what you can “buy” with the money you earn while you play), and the track list has a little something for everyone- Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rolling Stones, Santana, Slayer, Metallica, Rise Against, and a lot more.
Once you’ve beat this game on easy, move on to medium. Once you’re done with that, move on up all the way to expert. You’ll constantly be learning and expanding your song-list, and once you get really good you can even try to crank out perfect scores and wicked “star power” combinations. Besides, what’s more fun than jamming with a friend on cooperative career mode or duking it out head-to-head on the “battle” mode?
This game has a little something for everyone, so if you can manage to find yourself a copy I recommend buying it, playing it, and rocking right the heck out!
Oh, just make sure that you buy some ice packs for your wrists.
Overall: 9/10 - This game is amazing in every way. If you have never played Guitar Hero before you will love this game.
Sound: 9.5/10 - Jamming to Santana’s “Black Magic Woman” is as good as it gets.
Visuals: 8/10 - The visuals are nothing really fantastic, but they get the job done.
Gameplay: 9/10 - Must… put… guitar… down… but I CAN’T!
Story: N/A - this game isn’t about the story, it’s about the guitar.