

TV mode is a 24-hour streaming music video network with a free-to-play mechanic wrapped around it. It’s a small detail, but worth pointing out. There really should have been a ‘meh’ state, where they’re not really super into your playing but don’t totally dislike it either. They’re either loving everything you do or they’re cursing the day you were born. It seems like every single crowd at these shows are bipolar. That’s one thing that the game does have trouble with. At the end of each, you’ll be given a rating based on how well you kept the crowd happy. So at the very least don’t dismiss them out of hand.Įach show in the two festivals has you playing three to five songs with little to no gap in between. One thing that should be obvious to anyone watching them is that quite a bit of work went into their creation. I will chalk that up to the endless energy of youth, before the weight of the world crushed their souls and turned them into jaded, cynical people.

Perhaps some of the characters are a little overly hyper. Through full-motion video backdrops you’ll see all the backstage goings on as well as the performances themselves. During songs, the game puts you literally in the head of the guitarist. Between shows you’ll hear commentary radio announcers, as well as seeing fictional social media posts popping up. Each of the festivals and bands playing in them has their own unique vibe and personalities attached to them. Live mode consists of the game’s Career mode, where you play as the guitarist for bands performing at two fictional music festivals. These may as well have been two separate games. Guitar Hero Live is split into two sections: Live and TV. On the whole, the new controller, at least the ones shipping now, are quite good. It has that traditional clicky feel that all Guitar Hero hardware have had. Maybe a bit too responsive in some cases, as I’ve dropped combos by accidentally brushing up against an upper or lower button while transitioning from chord to chord. The buttons feel good, they don’t squeak, and they’re very responsive. That doesn’t appear to be the case with the controller I have now. The buttons didn’t feel particularly good and there was quite a bit of squeaking from them if you hit them at an off angle. The launch hardware seems to have had some issues. One shortly after launch, and one that came with the copy of the game I bought just now. To play all of those fancy notes, there is a new guitar controller. The new controller doesn’t look all that different, but it is. Guitar Hero Live does a nice job of keeping the difficulty curve reasonable, which will keep a lot of folks from giving up on it. When you move to advanced or expert difficulties you’ll get more complex note and chord patterns as well as faster scrolling charts to accommodate the extra notes. This wasn’t too intimidating at that difficulty, and it didn’t feel overwhelming for me.

When you play on regular difficulty you will start to see shades of how challenging the game can be, with black/white chord combinations, barre chord transitions, as well as a few good hammer-on and pull-off sections depending on the song. When you first start playing it, sure, things seem easy enough, especially on the casual or basic difficult level. It doesn’t sound like much of a change, in fact at first it might seem like they’ve made the game simpler to appeal to a wider audience and that there’s no challenge to be had with the new system.

The top three buttons correspond to black notes, the bottom three to white notes. The five colored fret buttons have been replaced by two rows of three buttons. The gameplay has changed significantly since the last time we’ve had our hands on a plastic axe. This brings me to the key difference between Guitar Hero Live and its predecessors.
Guitar hero live song rating series#
It isn’t, it’s just not what series vets are used to. Whether you like (or have ever heard of) the bands on the soundtrack is a personal thing, so it’s a bit unfair to say the soundtrack is bad. The game definitely favors the more pop-rock genres, at least as far as the on-disc tracks go. They’re clearly trying to appeal to a younger audience with the inclusion of acts like Eminem, OneRepublic, and Fall Out Boy, but there’s some good classic rock tracks on there as well. The game features 42 on-disc songs that skew more towards the late 90’s and 2000’s in terms of musical eras. In the past it focused on the hard rock to metal genres, but with this new installment to the series FreeStyle Games have opted to take a much broader approach to the song catalog. Guitar Hero Live is a solid music game with a solid soundtrack. Everything looks very familiar, until you look a little closer.
