Guitar Hero Live

There was a time when the Guitar Hero franchise was the king of the music game genre. Before companies started adding drums, keyboards, and microphones to their games, there was one franchise to rule them all: Guitar Hero. Some time after Rock Band’s rise to prominence, franchise owners decided that they had to do “that” too; they needed to offer the full band experience because just singing or playing guitar wasn’t enough. Konami tried it with Rock Revolution; Activision tried it with Guitar Hero World Tour. The problem was, they couldn’t do it all; at least not as well as Rock Band could. They could do some aspects better, like maybe providing a better guitar experience within the full band setup; however, when it came to the complete picture, they all fell short. Not only did they all fall short, but they ultimately flooded the market with their plastic instruments and cause the whole genre to seemingly implode. Now, roughly five years later, the plastic guitars are back and they have returned to form.

Guitar Hero Live (GHL) is the rebirth for the franchise. Gone are the days of trying to be like the competition. Instead, the GHL experience is narrow and focused, which is a really good thing. Your goal here, as it was originally, is to feel like a guitar-God and play with the best of the best. There have been a lot of changes made to the formula that fans are used to in order to accomplish this goal, and it all starts with the guitar itself.

Let me say right up front that I was very worried about GHL prior to release. The fact that the guitar controller was being redesigned was a huge gamble in my option. The franchise’s original, five-fret-button design has been the standard since the original game and is even used in the Rock Band series. Altering that was either going to be a huge success or a glorious disaster; thankfully, it ended up being the former. Rather than the old-style five button guitar, GHL adopts a new setup that uses six buttons spread across three different frets on the next of the guitar. All that you need now are three fingers and you don’t have to do any shifting up and down the neck.

Having at least a little bit of experience with playing a real guitar, I can say that this feels a lot more like the real thing than the previous setup. While I love the classic five-button mechanics, the feel of the new GHL controls is much more in line with what it feels like to play multiple strings on a real guitar. You’re forced to shift the stretch of your fingers back and forth across the neck, often at quick speeds. Plus, the game even incorporates open strumming, where no fret-presses are required. This definitely takes a bit of getting used to, so don’t expect to pick up right where you left off in the last Guitar Hero game. Once you get accustomed to the new system, the resulting experience makes for a much more natural feeling experience. I could easily see this becoming the standard in the genre and hope that we see more buttons added to represent the other frets in the future games.

Once you have become familiar with the new controls, you have your choice between two modes of play in the game, Live and TV. Despite the fact that both are rooted in the same mechanics, the experiences offered by each are really night and day. Live is the mode that was pushed prior to release as being the game’s main mode, where you participate in concerts from a first-person perspective. The crowd and your band mates will respond according based on your performance. It is a cool concept in theory but it really doesn’t function as well as one could have hoped.

For starters, there isn’t any sort of variation in terms of their responses to you; you are either being cheered or garnering stares of disdain all around. You’re either doing good or bad, there is no middle ground. Not only is there no middle ground for their reactions, but the transitions between the two is extremely clear cut; you actually see a bar “swoosh” across the screen when the game switches from one video feed to another. Plus, the perspective, albeit cool, is wasted because your focus is always on the note highway and the cues for the song that you are playing.

As a result, the Live mode feels more like a novelty than the core mode of the game. It’s a great concept but it just doesn’t play out as well as one might hope. It also doesn’t help that bands and stages used for this mode are all fictional and honestly, not well-acted. All of the interactions that you have with the other members of your band(s) and the various stage hands are laughably bad in terms of their acting and voice work. Plus, since the game is relying on these two separate, pre-filed experiences, they are the same each and every time that you play a song. It’s worth playing through once to unlock all of the songs for this mode in freeplay and to experience it all once, but you won’t want to go back after that.

While we are on the subject of unlocking songs, the main soundtrack of the game leaves A LOT to be desired. For a game called “Guitar Hero”, and a franchise that has traditionally focused on the greatest guitar performances in music history, the songs chosen for this mode are extremely disappointing. The majority of them are recent songs from genres that don’t even fit the concept of the game. I’m playing this game to feel like a badass guitar player, so why am I playing the background part on an Eminem song?

Thankfully, Guitar Hero TV, the game’s other mode, more than makes up for Live’s shortcomings. This is the heart and soul of this game and reason enough to pick it up if you are a fan of the franchise. GHTV is a live, interactive music network that allows you to battle it out, head to head, with other players around the world on a seemingly never-ending rotation of songs. It feels a lot like the modern fighting games in a sense, as you are striving to increase your personal rank which will determine which players you are grouped with online. Much like the new control scheme, GHTV was a risky idea that has ended up paying off big time.

The core GHTV experience involves you picking one of two channels on a television guide of scheduled programs of music videos. You don’t get to pick the individual songs, or even the genre, but rather you choose one of two channels that are running pre-programmed sets of music videos. You never know what song is going to be on, or what order they are going to play; you simply choose a channel, grab your guitar and put your skills to the test. While your playing, there is a ten-person leaderboard of players similar to your rank on the side of the screen for each given song. You are in constant competition with these 10 people with the hopes of finishing the song at the number one spot and earning the most points.

Aside from playing along with the random videos, you can also choose to play individual songs or sets from the mode’s entire music catalog. However, you won’t be doing this for free. You have to earn access to free playing songs buy spending the points that you earn playing along with the channels. Yes, it sounds a bit cheeky, but it actually works very, very well. You can throw down real-world cash to buy points too, but you really don’t need to do that. The in-game economy is really well balanced and it works out to about to requiring three successfully played channel-songs to earn a free-play song from the catalog. Plus, you’re awarded “plays” as you level up your account. Points can also be spent on other things such as different styled note-highways, cosmetic items for your profile card and even different power-ups to use during songs.

The entire concept works and it feels like you are dueling it out with these other guitarists on a stage. The song variety is excellent and new tunes are being added regularly to the channel lineups. Contrary to the other mode, these songs make a lot more sense and a large number of them are guitar-focused. The catalog also has a great mix of older and modern songs, with contributions from artists like Faith No More, Living Colour, Judas Priest, Korn, and Lenny Kravitz. There are others on there like Bruno Mars which helps add to the variety. Every visit to the mode seems to bring a new experience and I have found myself easily losing hours at a time in this mode. This is what I loved Guitar Hero for when I started playing with part two on the Xbox 360. GHTV is what this entire game should have been focused on because this is what works and what is truly the future of this franchise. Its original, the content is extremely varied, and most importantly, it is a ton of fun.

The entire concept of GHL was a gamble for the developers. They completely redesigned an established control mechanic and offered two new-styles of game modes to fans of an established franchise. While one of the gameplay modes (Live) didn’t exactly work out as planned, the other mode and the control scheme work out better than anyone could have hoped for. The new button setup and the GHTV concept is the future of this series and as long as the game remains focused on doing these things, this game could easily climb back to the top of the proverbial mountain in the music-game genre.