E3 2009: Guitar Hero 5 impressions

by: John - posted: 6/4/2009 1:26:00 AM

I make no secret that I found Guitar Hero World Tour disappointing. So with expectations low, I set out to look at Guitar Hero 5 today. I came away though with a sense that the game is back on track as being a fun musical game and one that anyone can play this time around.

One of the goals with Guitar Hero 5 was to make it accessible for anyone. There are things like no fail mode and other cheats to achieve this. We were shown Party Mode first off where you can play any combination of instruments and can jump in and drop out any time. The demo started off with John Lennon’s Saturday Alright for Fighting. One person played guitar for a bit when another person jumped in as bass. The note track slid over a little to accommodate the new player and the new player was able to choose the difficulty before jumping onto the song. After a minute, the drummer hopped in and again the note tracks slide over a little to accommodate the new player. Finally, the singer joined the act and the lyrics appeared at the top.

As the song progressed, one of the guitar players dropped out. All the note tracks slid around again with the player that left. He then proceeded to turn on his drum set and join in. The song never stopped playing and what we had was one singer, one guitarist, and two drummers. The singer then dropped out after a bit and hopped back into the game as a guitar player. All throughout the sequence the song never stopped playing and everything happened smoothly and seamlessly. This will be great for people to jump in when they want to play and groups of people to play their favorite instrument without having to go out of the interface, choose your instruments, and setup the song list.

The interface for the game has been streamlined a bit. The left side of the note track has your star power meter that’s a thin bar while the right side has your multiplayer indicator. Because of the minimalist approach, having four note tracks on the bottom when four people are using instruments isn’t too crowded.

Some changes have been made over World Tour that made me pretty happy. Everyone now has their own star power meter so you won’t have one person hogging it all. When someone fails out of a song, the other band members have a chance to bring them back now rather than having the entire band fail at that time.

Another cool change is that there’s only one career mode path and you can use any instrument to progress through it. You can even switch to different instruments and keep continuing on the career mode. If you have friends online, you can have them join you to help your career mode as well. It’s a great setup and one that I think has been long overdue on the career mode feature.

There are some new competitive modes that seem to be well done. Compete against others to see who can have the longest streak of notes, best percentage during sections of songs, and last man standing where the person with the lowest percentage gets eliminated until only one is left to name a few. You can also play combinations of competitive modes and see who wins the most events. Watching the group play the perfection mode where you see who gets the best percentages of notes hit in sections of the song, it was fun to see the back and forth between the players as the order of finish kept changing as the song played. The competitive modes look pretty fun and should offer a nice addition to the gameplay available.

A brief mention of the music studio was mentioned saying there were many, many improvements to the system. I asked about compatibility with current GH Studio songs but since the software has gone through a major upgrade, they don’t know if this would be possible. It would be sad to not be able to import all those songs that many people worked hard on so let’s hope the developers find a way to do it.

As far as songs go, there are going to be 85 songs and there will be compatibility with all the current and future Guitar Hero World Tour DLC. Not all the songs will be able to be transferred due to licensing but the majority of them will. I’m just happy Under Pressure will finally be playable on Guitar Hero.

From what I saw, Guitar Hero 5 looks like a good pickup and definitely fixes the problems I had with World Tour. The song list looks pretty diverse and the new modes , especially the party play mode, looks really fun. Look for the game to come to stores this Fall.