Guitar Hero 3 Review

Guitar Hero 3 (PS3)

Review by David Henry

Nowadays everyone has heard, heard of or played a music game. It’s turning into a true pop culture phenomenon. The moment everyone realised this was the release of Guitar Hero for the Playstation 2. The game shipped with a small Fisher Price looking plastic guitar, on this guitar were five coloured buttons and a strum bar. Pressing the right coloured button at the right time and strumming the strum bar resulted in music playing from your TV-speakers.

Now the third Guitar Hero game is out and, it’s still fundamentally the same game. Is this a bad thing? No, not necessarily it isn’t. The main gameplay elements are extremely solid, the guitar notes are well laid out and there’s a great set list. However, if you’ve played Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2, you might not be very impressed by the changes.

This time around there’s a huge set list of over seventy songs, and a pretty diverse one at that. Everything from Santana to Slayer is here, something for everyone. Some might argue that there’s too much metal, however I disagree because for every Korn there’s a ZZ Top.

As for the difficulty of the songs I felt that easy and medium were a bit too easy and hard and expert a bit too hard. At times it can be incredibly frustrating when you get stuck on a certain song, however, if you jump into training mode, you’ll often get past it with sufficient practice.

Graphically the game looks good, nothing out of this world to be seen here, but it gets the job done with some nice effects and lighting going on to spice things up a little.

The big new thing in this iteration is the inclusion of two “rock gods”, namely Slash and Tom Morello (oh, and wannabe Bret Michaels is in there as well). Neversoft would have you believe that this is the best thing since sliced bread, this is however simply not true. It’s not revolutionary at all, in fact, it’s pretty half baked. Progression now “revolutionarily” goes like so: song- song­- song- song-Rock God encounter (a.k.a. song)-song-song etc. Does that sound mind blowing? Not so much, huh? Well it’s still cool to play as Slash.

There’s another new thing here, not promoted as much by Neversoft as Slash and co., namely the new guitar. It’s based on a Gibson Les Paul, probably the most iconic guitar shape ever. The little devil plays great. There’s one small complaint I have, being that when you try to activate the star power by tilting up the guitar, sometimes it doesn’t react and you have to flail it upwards a few times to get it to work.

And then the crème de la crème: Online Play! Yes it’s here and it’s great. Being able to start up the game choose quick play online and be playing someone from across the globe in under a minute is just pure bliss. All sorts of filtering options are in place as well so if you want to play against say, only medium players, just click the option and you’re ready to go.

So we have: great songs, Rock Gods, the best guitar controller around, people flailing around a room and all of this awesomeness online! Sounds like Guitar Hero to me. Like I said that’s not a bad thing but if you’re a veteran of the series the only real incentive to buy this version is probably the new Gibson Les Paul controller.

If you’re new to the series though, now is the time to hop on board. It’s a great game, frustrating at times but boy is it fun!

If a game can keep you occupied from 8 pm till 5 am it must be doing something right.

David Henry

01/26/2008