Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock
Nintendo Wii
Put down your guitar and pick up a plastic one, it’s time to shred to some classics in good ol’ fashion five button guitar shredding. That’s right; the third iteration of the beloved guitar playing series has hit consoles, what game could I possibly be talking about? Why none other then Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.
With a game like Guitar Hero the story is pretty bland; basically you’re an up and coming band who plays a series of gigs. You start out small and eventually become a rock legend, well there you go, that’s about the gist of the story it’s really not a large contributing factor to the game and players realize this as well.
But for what little story is there, it’s kind of cool and it does move the story along, they use cut scenes that are done in a comic book type fashion. It’s alright but, considering that there’s about 7 or 8 cut scenes it’s not really a lot and there really quick, I doubt any of them surpass one minute. Career is fun though as you just play a bunch of songs from easy to hardest and you’ll definitely enjoy it. Also if you’ve got a friend over, you can play co-op career, it’s got different cut-scenes and the track list is all mixed up and shorter. Both of them are a lot of fun to play.
But, if you’re buying Guitar Hero, I highly doubt you’re getting it for its story, and I highly doubt that you’ll even care. When it comes to it in this game, I don’t see it as a contributing factor and it definitely isn’t going to hurt the overall package too much.
So, visuals, well to start things off I’m going to talk about the negatives, best get the worst out of the way. One of the worst aspects of the visuals on the Wii is the characters, not the guitarist but the companions. The bassist looks like wolf man and the drummer looks fake, his movements are very stiff and look dumb. Also, the singer could be better, he definitely not great. The audience is disgusting, they really are horrible, and it’s almost painful to watch them.
But now, for the ups, the guitarist’s character models are pretty well done, as they all have special moves and actually seem to have personality with their movements. Also, the costumes for the characters are brilliant, their design is interesting and good looking, you can really see were they put the most effort. Also, speaking of effort, the guitars are really well done, some better then others. Also, the stages are pretty wicked; if you actually spend some time to look at them you’ll see that a lot’s going on back there. Like for instance, if you get really low in the red something will change on stage. It’s a pretty cool feature and adds depth to the graphics.
But, the most important of all the visuals is the fret board and let me tell you it looks great. There are a variety of different fret boards that are just subtle enough that they don’t distract you from the game but they still look cool. Also, the buttons look great now; they make Guitar Hero II look like prototype buttons. They look really crisp and polished; you can tell that they put a lot of effort into making what you’re initially looking at look good.
So, if you’re playing the game, well all you’ll really be looking at is the fret board so you’ll think it looks awesome, but if a friend is watching, they probably won’t be too impressed by the overall look of the characters and such.
Now, the real thing that makes this game awesome is its gameplay. There’s something about the simplicity of playing these five buttons with a fake guitar that just rocks. But, for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a brief explanation of what Guitar Hero essentially is. You have five buttons: green, red, yellow, blue and orange in that order along the fret board. When these notes appear on your screen you have to hold the note down and play the strum bar as they cross over a small threshold. Sure, sounds boring when I write it out, but playing it will convince you of its glory.
There are four difficulty levels: easy, medium, hard and expert. In easy you only use the first three buttons and the notes come at you slowly, it’s perfect for beginners as it’s just easy enough to not be too frustrating and still be fun. Then you have medium, now you’re using four buttons and the notes come faster, this difficulty is perfect for an average gamer that’s only played a bit. Now, when going into hard it gets really difficult as now you’re using all the notes and the notes are coming pretty darn fast now. In this difficulty you’ll have to master the orange button, an infamous button do to the fact that you have to shift your fingers to reach it. It’s hard and it suits its name, only a seasoned player will be able to master this difficulty. Finally the master of all difficulties, expert mode; expert truly is for expert, utilizing every button and with the notes coming at you at insane speeds you need to have truly mastered the game to do well in this mode. Alas, fear not, it is doable but it’s definitely for those who are confident in their abilities.
Now, wit the notes there are single notes, long notes, chords, hammer ons, and pull offs. Single notes are basically one note that you have to hit by strumming and holding the button down. Long notes are notes that after you strum the initial note you have to hold down the buttons until the bar has ended. Chords are simply single notes with more then one note being held down, they can also be chords. Hammer ons and pull offs are for the more advanced players, basically if a note is glowing brighter you can hit it without strumming, very useful. There’s also a very special kind of note that gets you special power, star power notes. Star power notes are shaped in stars and if you hit them all in a row you’ll get a chunk of star power, fill up your star power meter and you can bring your guitar up and turn all the notes blue and get double the points.
There are also a few meters in the game; one is how well you’re doing. Red means you’re sucking, yellow means you’re doing all right and green means you’re rocking. There’s also a score meter that measures your score and how much more points you get as if you don’t miss notes you accumulate an x meter. So if you don’t miss a lot of notes in a row you may get x4 points, but that’s as far as it goes (except you can get x8 in star power) for x points. There’s also the star power meter and a small meter that tells you how many notes you’ve hit in a row.
The game has a variety of options to play with, you can do a career (which I’ve talked about), co-op career, play quick play, multiplayer and wi-fi (which I’ll talk about later). Quick play is essential just playing a song; it’s good and no need for change. The three multiplayer options are fun, there’s Face-Off, Pro Face-Off and Battle. Face-Off is when you play a song against a person and you see who is better, except you each only play parts of the song and can choose what difficulty you wish to use. Pro-Face Off you both play one level of difficulty and you each play the full song. Battle is fun, instead of star power you get battle powers which allow you to do things to make the other player screw up and hopefully loose, all great additions.
Now, you can play a bunch of songs from a song list and you can buy bonus tracks in career mode. The songs are all fun but some are worst then others, it also depends on what kind of music you like and the type of notes you like playing. Like stairways or hammer ons, ext… Really though, Guitar Hero has a nearly perfected gameplay strategy that should last them years.
Now, the thing that makes this game fun as well is the controls. You get a guitar shaped control that you plug you Wii remote into. It has five buttons, a strum bar, a whammy bar, the + and - buttons and an analog stick. What they’ve done is great and the controller just feels great and there’s something that’s just great about the controller. It feels good and it just seems like a mini guitar.
Really though, without the controller the game would suck, as the option is there to play with the Wii remote and let’s face it, playing with the Wii remote is plain old horrible. No one wants to use it and it’s probably impossible to play the harder songs with it. Which is a problem; they aren’t releasing a new controller until January. What’s the deal? You can’t really fully enjoy the co-op without two controllers, so unless your friend also owns the game you’ll have to wait awhile to truly enjoy co-op.
Music is Guitar Hero, without music there is no Guitar Hero and in this game the music is awesome. The main track list has a lot of great songs with amazing guitar, like Metallica’s One, Muse, Weezer, Cream, Aerosmith and more. All of the songs are good, some phenomenal and others are all right. Most of the track list is master recordings as well, but there are some re-recordings, but you can’t always notice. But some are more obvious then others.
There are also a lot of bonus tracks which severely vary in quality. Some of them are incredible (Through the Fire and Flames) while other’s suck hard core. But, at least there are bonus tracks and a lot to boot. So some people will like certain songs while others will like different ones, it’s really hit and miss.
One special section for this review is Wi-Fi; with Wi-Fi you have a variety of games that you can play like, Auto-Match with friends, Stranger match (ranked or unranked), and friends match. Auto-Match simply tries and finds a friend that’s online and sends them an invitation to play. Stranger match allows you to play anyone in the three multiplayer games: Face-Off, Pro Face-Off and Battle. You can either play them as ranked matches that count towards your matches on
http://www.guitarhero.com or as fun unranked matches. You can either create a match or join a game, most games can go to best out of 7 were whoever wins the most songs wins. The last online option is Friends match, you can play everything from strangers match except these matches are with people from your friend roster.
There are also things like your friend roster, message of the day, and the leader boards. The friend roster is the place where you can see all of the friends who you’ve added their friend code. Message of the day is simply a message for the day; it’s usually just some type of hint or advice. The leader boards display who has the highest scores in what parts of the game, it’ll also show your score for that section on the side; it’s a pretty cool feature.
Now, the true question, how does online run? Good? Bad? Rest assure, online, if you have a decent connection it’ll feel like your playing the game normally. There is no lag what so ever and only sometimes you’ll lose connection. But that happens if you have a bad connection or if they do. Personally I’ve experienced some slow down but that was only because the person I played against had a horrible connection. So all in all you’ll find that the online portion of Guitar Hero is some of the best online to be incorporated in a Wii game to date.
Now, does this game have replay value? Oh yes it does, with all of these options to pick from you’ll be playing this game for days, nay, weeks, no, months! There’s really an amazing amount of things to do, like beat the career on every difficulty, or play in tournaments online. This is one game you’ll be coming back to. So, it begs the question, for 100$ is it actually worth my money? Well, like I’ve said throughout the review; yes. It’s well worth it, best video game purchase you’ll make this year most likely. So go out there and buy yourself Guitar hero III you won’t regret it.
So, here we are the end of the review. You and I have had an adventure; we’ve explored what makes a game great. I’d say we’ve done a good job, looks like we’ve dug deep to the roots, so, question is did you explore it with me? Did you read it all? Did you find out the little niches of the game? Did you find the small problems? Or did you just come to the end to find out if it got a good score? Well, if so then shame on you, you’ll never no if it’s truly great from a score. Go now, to the top of the review and read on gamer, for it’s a well worthy read.
As for you who have read the review and are now at the final section, looks like it’s time to compile all of the ideas displayed in my review and make them into numbers, truly numbers are all they are. Not really what the review is about, do you agree? I hope so, anyways, I hope you like my review and I’ll see you all next time.
Story- 6.5/10
-The cut-scenes are all right but that’s about the story you’ll get.
Visuals-8.5/10
-The characters aren’t great but the fret board is what you’ll look at and it’s awesome.
Gameplay-9.8/10
-There’s hardly a flaw in the gameplay, only small ones.
Controls-9.5/10
-Other then playing with the Wii-Remote, the Guitar Hero controls rules and makes the game great.
Music-9.5/10
-The main list music is awesome and some of the many bonus tracks aren’t bad either.
Wi-Fi-9/10
-Sometimes there’s slowdown, and friend codes are painful, but still great online.
Replay/Value-10/10
-Totally worth your money and you’ll play it over and over again.
Overall-9.5/10
(Not an Average)
-Alex51011
For more on Guitar Hero II check out my recent Blog entry:
Guitar Hero III Blog
)
