Video Game Review: Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock

I fully admit to being a bit biased in the music game genre. For me, Harmonix will be the developer who knows what to do in the rock game genre, because they started it with the original Guitar Hero, and went to greener pastures with Rock Band. I have Rock Band 3 reserved, and I play the hell out of Rock Band 2 to this day. It's the one game that, despite playing the same things over and over again, I can always go back and do something different. I may have played "Siva" and "Well Thought Out Twinkles" 100 times this month, but, hey, I haven't played "The Feel Good Drag" in a little while! The set list is varied, even including country, and, bizarrely enough, rap, but it doesn't force you to play genres you hate with a varied amount of DLC.

Now, for the longest time, I've been thinking that Neversoft and Red Octane have been compete morons when it came to the Guitar Hero series. They've made the game more difficult, read "make easy mode easy, medium-hard, hard-expert, expert-death on a stick, and expert+-my God, it's full of stars!" To make matters worse, they never caught on that the circles on the track are hard to strum/strike at the right time due to the shape and size. Each game has been more difficult for the wrong reasons: adding more notes to easier modes instead of the actual song being challenging, and not fixing a simple design problem. The eye doesn't easily line up round shapes into a round hole.

Red Octane is gone now, and Neversoft starts their solo career by making the Guitar Hero characters turn into monsters to plagiarize Brutal Legend, right down to the map's art style. If this sounds like a good idea to you, here's where you should relocate to. It gets even better, because each character has their own power to help you rock. For example, one character can over hype her fans to gain 2-5 extra stars. This means you can get one star, and still pass the song. The powers pretty much feel like cheating.

Here's the sad part: you'll need to cheat, too, unless you're the God of Rock. The first two levels are extremely easy, and then, the game decides that it wants to advance you to the next mode up. I usually play guitar on hard, due to the fact that I don't have the dexterity for expert yet. Hard in this game is Expert for Rock Band and the other Guitar Hero games. This was meant to cater to the fans who play on Expert. It throws off the people who aren't on Expert, on the ther hand. This is especially considering the fact that half of the soundtrack, while it's supposed to range through all types of rock, is over %50 speedy, deathly, metal or speedy, deathly prog. So, to advance through the game, you need to use your powers (most of which activate on their own only) and not worry about hitting all the notes. The only time I failed a song was because the track was going to fast for me to respond to the notes, and I was strumming too late, and because there is a new bug: the game will not pick up some rapid strums. It's irritating when you have a succession of five notes, and you strum five times, but on the last note, the game responds to it as a miss.

It's not over strum, either. Even on easier modes, with now extremely rapid notes, the game will jerk the track and say you missed a note that you hit, and it counted. Other times, it'll just jerk the track. On the other hand, vocals are the same as Guitar Hero 5, meaning you don't have to sound exactly like the singer to pass a song, but you'll still miss a perfect score if you don't say one word at the right time. While it feels good to sing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in my own voice (mostly), I still have to do a falsetto to get the high notes, where, you know, the harmony should be. Seriously, Rock Band has done harmony in two, soon three, different games, and Guitar Hero can't get the point? Overall, though, the gameplay is the mostly the same, though, it is a little bit leaned to the player, as if they realized that they made the game too hard, and decided to make it impossible to lose unless you just purposely lost or weren't used to the speed.

Let's head over to the graphics. Most of the time, they suck, even for Guitar Hero's art style. Again, this is due to character design issues. Judy Nails, once again, is made into a sex symbol at the ripe age of 17, and changes into a succubus with a Glasgow Smile and one wing. Really?! Small details, such as mesh sleeves, tend to get stretched out and blurred, too. The real trick is that so much is animated, including details on some of the guitars, that it distracts you from the game.

Again, though, they did do something right, both with graphics and soundtrack. They made a Rush setlist, and based the three venues off of the setlist: the entire 20 minutes of "2112" as narrated by the band. Cool if you're a Rush fan, but it feels a little forced into the game's... "story." I mean, the only similarity is that you find a guitar in a cave. Woo!

Finally, the setlist. Aside from Rush, I have found a whopping total of five songs I like that aren't on Rock Band, or announced for Rock Band 3. Others that I kind of like are incredibly boring to play. I love me some A Perfect Circle, but why did they pick "The Outsider" over the obvious technical songs like, "The Hollow," "Magdelena," "Pet," or even "Thinking Of You?" The have Rammstein's "Waidmanns Heil" (a song about "hunting" women) and Nine Inch Nails' "Wish" (a.k.a. "the Fist Fuck Song"), why not have a song about masturbation? To make that even worse, the tracks that were all ready in Rock Band are copied exactly like they are in that game, only with hammer-ons thrown in to make it seem different. The main riff for "The Feel Good Drag" isn't constantly hammered-on in reality.

This game really isn't worth the price of admission for these reasons, and one big one: it was meant to cater to the series' fanbase, but with the "Warrior" premise, and some cheap and terrible song choices, it will alienate them. GH is trying to compete with RB by ignoring true innovation (seriously, harmonies and a keyboard with RB3, the same exact gameplay with GH6), and saying that slightly changing characters will make it a different game by adding monster powers, and giving the same powers to the characters anyway. Do yourself a favor, buy RB3, and wait for this to go down in price if you really want to play the same songs on a different game.

Overall:

D

+ Same game play...

- Marred by upping the difficulty level for no real reason

- Powers feel like your cheating

+RUSH!!!!

- Copycat setlist from Rock Band!!!

- Seriously... 17 year olds...

* Edit: They put a NO FAIL mode in the game as a pre-unlocked cheat. NO FAIL mode on a game that you have to try to fail on. Seriously?