Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits Review

Overview

Title: Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits (also known as Guitar Hero: Smash Hits in North America)

Release Date: June 16th 2009 (NA), June 24th 2009 (AU), June 26th 2009 (EU)

Developer / Publisher: Beenox Studios / RedOctane

Genre: Music

Platforms: Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Playstation 2, Nintendo Wii (I am reviewing the Xbox 360 version of the game)

Introduction

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 4 years or so, you’re bound to have played or at least heard of the Guitar Hero games. For the uninitiated, you pick the instrument you’d like to play (lead guitar, bass, drums, or vocals) and perform each song by either striking the correct note as it passes the hit zone at the bottom of the screen, or singing in the correct pitch which is indicated alongside the lyrics. As you play the song accurately, you score points and build up your rock meter, hopefully ending the song with a 5 star rating and feeling like a rock god. Perform badly, and you’ll get booed off stage and made to feel like a rock pauper.

Gameplay

GH: Greatest Hits borrows some features from both Guitar Hero World Tour and Guitar Hero: Metallica. Though the game features a set list composed of songs from previous Guitar Hero games, each of those tracks has now been set up for full band play, just like in GHWT. This obviously makes for a much better multiplayer experience as you gather 3 other friends around you, each playing an instrument or wailing on the microphone.

The career mode here has been borrowed from Guitar Hero: Metallica. Instead of a gig based system like GH:WT, or a tier based system like the original GH games, Greatest Hits falls somewhere inbetween. As you go through the career, you need to amass a certain number of stars before you can unlock the next venue and next set of songs. As you can gain between 3 and 5 stars per song, good performances will obviously see you unlocking the next venue quicker than if you were only just passing each song. This system works quite well as not only does it let you ignore the songs you’re not too keen on, but if you get stuck on a particular tune you can skip it and concentrate on collecting your stars elsewhere.

Another feature taken from GH: Metallica is that in the Quick Play mode, all songs are unlocked and available from the start. This is especially useful if you just fancy a quick play on songs you’ve not unlocked yet, or if you take the game around to a friend’s house, you can play anything you want without having to waste time going through the career.

As well as playing locally you have the usual online options, with the ability to go online and challenge fellow rockers world wide to prove you are the rock king. There are various ways to do this, including Face Off and Pro Face Off matches. It’s fun to play against people online but I’ve always believe the main fun in these games is having a bunch of friends around (and some drinks, if you’re old enough) and just rocking out as a group.

One big problem with the game however, is that the game is effectively a completely standalone title. Unlike Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band, there will be no downloadable content for this game. That means that if you’re a fan of GH:WT and have purchased any of the song packs that are released on a regular basis, you’ll have to load up that game to play it. Given how well the Rock Band series has handled DLC, with all the songs that were made available for the first game also being available to Rock Band 2, it baffles me that this decision was made. If you’ve spent a fair amount of money on DLC for GH:WT, you’d have to think long and hard about whether to spend the additional £40 or so to get an extra 48 songs that can only be played in this game, not imported into the main game in the series. Hopefully this is something that can rectified for Guitar Hero 5.

Graphics

The graphics have never been a selling point of the Guitar Hero franchise, and nothing has changed here in that respect. The characters look decent enough and the locations are varied enough, but people don’t buy these games for its visual prowess. The developers know this, and it shows. They’re functional and not much more, but they do the job well enough and you won’t find any real reason to complain about the graphics on offer here.

Audio

The set list is the place where a music game like Guitar Hero really lives or dies. Thankfully for GH: Greatest Hits, it has one of the best lines up in the genre. The set list here is comprised of some of the best songs from Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero 2, Guitar Hero III, Guitar Hero: Rocks the 80s, and Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. It’s all down to personal opinion of course, but it’s hard to argue with the songs chosen and I personally am only disappointed by a few omissions here.

The majority of the songs that are here were done as cover versions in the older games, especially Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2, but thanks to the continuing popularity of the games, every song here is now a proper master copy done by the original recording artist, though two of the songs here are live versions instead of studio versions. This change means that songs are now even more fun to play as you know you’re playing the version that you’ve heard on the radio, or from the albums you’ve bought. It’s a small but fairly significant change.

One problem that only long term GH players will face however are the differences in the note charts in this game compared to previous games. For new players this obviously won’t be an issue, but for people who’ve spent a long time perfecting previous games you may find the changes a pain to contend with. The changes that have been made don’t feel like sensible changes as well. It’s hard to put a finger on it, but the note charts here just feel slightly wrong compared to previous games.

Achievements

The Greatest Journey in History	Complete a song in every venue	10
You Cannot Beat Me	Win an online Pro Face-Off match by 25,000 points or more	20
Jaw Dropper	Win an online Face-Off match by 25,000 points or more	20
You Should Be Afraid	Win an online Face-Off match	10
One For All	Complete a song in a Band (4 players)	20
Rockers’ Guide To Godhood	Complete the Career Tutorial	5
The Greatest Crew	Complete a song with all Band members on Expert (4 player Band)	20
Golden Fingers	Perform as the Guitarist	5
Play With Me	Play 20 online matches	20
Low-Pitched King	Complete the Career as the Bassist	30
Thunder Kissing	Trigger Star Power simultaneously (4 player Band)	10
Craving For More	Download a song from GHTunes(SM)	5
I Wanna Rock	Complete a song with any instrument on any difficulty in local Quickplay or Career.	5
Rock Legends	Complete the Career in a Band (2-4 players)	30
Promising Diva	Perform as the Vocalist	5
Cowboys From Hell	Get 100% on a song as a Band (4 players)	25
Band Leader	Score the highest individual score in a 4 player Band	10
Unyielding	Complete the Career as the Drummer	30
Wondrous Strummer	Complete the Career as the Guitarist	30
Bark At The Moon	Complete the Career as the Vocalist	30
Unnoticed Presence	Perform as the Bassist	5
The One Man Band	Complete all four instrument Careers on any difficulty	35
War Apparatus	Complete a song on Expert+ (Drums only)	25
Master Craftsman	Create a new customer instrument	5
Artist On The Rise	Create a new custom Band logo	5
Masterpiece	Create a new customer rocker	5
Mooned	Perform as the Drummer	5
There’s Hope!	Recover from a poor performance	10
Clash Of The Titans	Win a Band vs Band match (8 players)	15
Ink And Blood	Create a custom tattoo	5
Glory to the Daring	Play a song in the Atlantis venue	10
Face To Face	Win an online Pro Face-Off match	10
Killing In The Name	Win 50 online matches	45
Rock Veteran	Play 150 songs throughout your entire career	20
Amazing Rockstar	Complete single player Expert Career on all instruments	100
Smoking!!!	Complete the song Smoke On The Water as the Vocalist	10
Deadzone	Fail a song with available Star Power in single player	10
Cyborg	You got a 100 note streak in the song Through The Fire And Flames on Hard or higher as the Drummer	45
That was Close!	You wong a song with the rock meter in red	10
8th Wonder	You completed the song Through The Fire And Flames with 4 stars or more as the Guitarist on Expert	35
Lightning Speed!	You completed the song YYZ with 5 stars on Expert Bass	25
Hail The Reverend	Get 5 stars on the song Beast And The Harlot as the Drummer on Expert without using Star Power	10
You Play It Well	You perfectly played the Let’s Play! section in the song Play With Me as a lead Guitarist on Expert	35
Raining Notes	You perfectly played the First Blood section of the song Raining Blood as the guitarist on Expert	35
Inhuman	You scored 5 stars in a song on Expert with Lars Umlaut in single player	10
Rising Star	You completed 100% on any song on Expert in single player	20
Free As A Band	You scored 2,000,000 points on Free Bird as a Band	35
Golden Voice	You scored 95% or more on the song Killer Queen as the Vocalist (Expert)	35
Open Minded Strummer	You hit all Open Strum notes in the song Laid To Rest as the Bassist	10
Bloody Feet	You completed the song Raining Blood with 5 stars as the Drummer on Expert+	35

Overall Score & Replayability

The Guitar Hero games remind me a little of a horror film franchise. While the first films are often innovative and top quality, with each subsequent release the films just seem to be put out there to milk as much money as possible from customers, leaving us with films like Jason X and Halloween Resurrection. The Guitar Hero franchise reminds me of that in some ways, with the first couple of games being exceptional, but since then we’ve seen several additional games which don’t add too much to the series, and can easily be seen as cash-ins on the franchise. Unfortunately, Guitar Hero Greatest Hits falls directly into the “milking it” category. Why all these songs weren’t released as DLC is beyond me, and though the set list is great and still pretty enjoyable to play through, it’s hard to justify the price tag when we’ve seen it and done it before. Even if you’re new to the Guitar Hero franchise, I’d recommend you stick with Guitar Hero World Tour or Rock Band 2 where the addition of DLC gives both games infinitely more longevity than GH: Greatest Hits. You can go through the career once, but unless you have the desire to go through on higher difficulties there’s no other incentives to playing through it again.