It’s fun, and it also feels innovative enough to be easily distinguished from predecessors or competition. As mentioned, note combinations may include multiple buttons at a time from different rows. There are notes sections that offer power-ups if you hit them all. Frets come down the track, and you’ve got to hit them in rhythm to score points. The innovative new guitar input translates into the same solid Guitar Hero gameplay that fans have come to expect. Still, the hardware seems decently well designed and will hopefully hold up over the years, unless you get unlucky with a manufacturing fault. The whammy bar on our unit is notably squeaky. Because the game is notably lenient on missed notes, you’ll know when you’ve messed up, and when the guitar did. There are occasions when it feels like the game misses or doubles up your inputs, breaking your streak, and these occasions can be frustrating. With any rhythm game, controller precision is highly important, and in that regard the new hardware holds up well. The strumming and whammy bars remain largely unchanged, and the whole build of the guitar feels of decent quality. As mentioned, it’s physically more comfortable to play, even as you crank up the difficulty. The notes get creatively complex – sometimes forcing you to hold down the top and bottom button of the same pair (directly above one another), or scramble your brain and press the top and bottom notes of different pairs.įans that spent their share of quality time with the previous Guitar Hero games will need some time to adjust, but most should be able to get comfortable rather quickly. It makes for a more realistic, but also a much more comfortable experience – no longer do you need to stretch your wrist and pinkie finger. With only three note lanes to work with, you’ll need to move your fingers up and down, instead of along the neck of the guitar. The top three buttons are directly above the bottom three, so when you’re playing, there are immediate notable differences. But let’s start with the guitar – gone are the classic five colored buttons in a row, in their place two rows of three buttons. The basic concept is the same – you get a new plastic guitar, and you’ll use it to simulate playing as a lead guitarist across a variety of music tracks. However now, five years later, FreeStyleGames, gets to take the reins once again, this time with Guitar Hero Live, as it looks to reinvigorate the genre.

That studio went on to create the unique DJ Hero and its excellent sequel – but unfortunately, whether due to poor timing or too small of a target audience, that franchise never got a third entry. In the tail-end of the chaos, Activision purchased developer FreeStyleGames following their work on some of the Guitar Hero DLC.

Target guitar hero live