Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock
Publisher: RedOctane
Developer: Neversoft Entertainment
Genre: Music
Release: October 28, 2007
Platform: Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC
Reviewer: Eric
Out
with the old and in with the new. Guitar Hero 3 is back but this
time it isn’t a rushed game with few songs to justify the price
tag. The company that’s brought us Tony Hawk games for way too
long has finally stepped out of the box to make something
enjoyable. Did Neversoft cut and paste with Guitar Hero 3 or did
they make a game that will shine in the Guitar Hero franchise?
My answer is yes Neversoft has made a good game, but all they
did was tweak enough things to make the game seem like it’s
completely new.
The best part of Guitar Hero 3 has to be the soundtrack. Guitar
Hero 3 has songs ranging from legend rockers The Rolling Stones
to alternative saviors The Killers, there isn’t a dull moment in
this game. It is a known fact that the best and hardest songs in
the Guitar Hero franchise are the metal tracks and GH3 has some
metal songs that will make you cry after only forty seconds.
Jumping into most of the metal tracks on here, yes I’ll consider
Disturbed metal for this review; will have you hearing the new
“wrong note” sound over and over again. Do you think you can
beat the DragonForce song on expert? I’ll check your gamer
score, even on medium this song is a death wish.
Activision went all out with during the first steps in creating
this game. Even before Neversoft started working their magic
Activision actually had the Sex Pistols re-record their smash
song Anarchy in the UK. Pretty good idea except the song didn’t
really have the same feel as the original, but I give Activision
huge props for this decision. Also Living Colour’s song Cult of
Personality had the same thing happen, but this was due to the
band not having the original master copy of the song.
It might have cost Activision a lot of money to get the
original masters to over fifty songs. Thankfully with the help
of Neversoft this version of Guitar Hero is filled with
advertisements every where. Looking through the songs you will
see
Wrigley's 5 Gum. The shop you buy everything is from Guitar
Center. Christ the one stage is on a Pontiac vehicle, playing
your recently purchased Axe Body Wash guitar here feels super
awesome too. Ads in video games isn't anything new, Neversoft is
the company that pretty much ruined this idea so why not have
them do the same with GH3. It just really seems funny when the
story in this game is about a band that doesn't want to sell
out. Strange indeed, maybe calling this Guitar Hero 3: Corporate
Mascots would have been a better idea.
I
might be the only one to say this and the more I think about it
I will. The boss stages in GH3 are pointless, boring and
sometimes way too hard. You get to battle guitar legends in two
of the three boss stages, Slash from Velvet Revolver and Tom
Morello from Rage Against the Machine. Two stinking legends,
isn’t the game called Legends of Rock? Boss stages are
stressful, the only way to beat these is to save your special
attacks and unleash them all at once. My brother found this out
when I was having a fit loosing to Slash for the fourth time. I
know this is a no brainier doing this, but does it really have
to be this way? Yeah it does, trying playing the boss stages the
“normal way”, gain your special move and let either of these two
legends have it. It just doesn’t work; you’ll being playing
these guys too many times if you don’t build up your attacks for
one massive blow. Honestly this might not work all the time too,
but you have a greater chance at victory doing this.
Graphically Guitar Hero 3 seems a lot more unrealistic. Each
of the eight stages in GH3 is lacking that concert feel, except
the prison stage, which is a huge rip off of the movie This Is
Spinal Tap. Not only do these stages lack anything that remotely
makes them see real you have to deal with the boring crowd. Do
these people even care about you rocking out to Slayer’s Raining
Blood? Not really, maybe if the huge hammer smashed the vocalist
they’d cheer more. Even the dancing girls, who seem to be in the
majority of the stages, can’t get the crowd going. Also there
are a lot of the same people in the crowd too, this normally
doesn’t bother me since my favorite game series, WWE Smackdown
vs. Raw, does the same thing, but at least the crowd in that
game has more than two set animations. These people seem like
zombies to me. Your characters you can pick in the game have
better animations, however the leader singer looks like his jaw
is ready to fall off his face.
Remember
when I mentioned little changes in GH3? Remember how Guitar Hero
2 had a lot of two chords in all the songs? In GH 3 Neversoft
has decided to make three chords your new best friend. The
hammer-on and pull-off techniques are a must in Guitar Hero 3
too, if you haven’t mastered these two fairly simple techniques
then you’ll be missing out on a lot of money to spend on the
store, you have to be able to do these, no questions asked. If I
may have scared you there I’ll make things better now, hitting
one note over and over again is seen is almost every song after
the easy difficulty. Fun, but you will be getting tired after a
few songs.
Guitar Hero 3 is not nearly as hard as the last game. Out of all
the tracks on this game there are only really five or so that
will give you a hard time, the hardest being Through the Fire
and Flames by power metal band DragonForce. Some of my favorite
songs on here, Weezer’s My Name Is Jones comes to mind first, is
too damn easy. On my first try on medium I didn’t miss more than
ten notes and I think some of the reason I messed up was the
fact my arm was getting tired. My brother was able to get a
perfect on Miss Murder, medium difficulty, on his second try.
The only real difficulty with GH3 is the lag this game has on
high definition televisions. At first myself, my brother and
girl friend thought we might have got bad at the game. It turns
out there is a lag on high definition televisions that will slow
the notes down at the last minute; this is a notable problem
that message boards and other reviewers have pointed out. The
options screen does have a setting that can fix this problem,
but there is another minor problem that can screw you up still.
What can this other problem be? Take a look at the new Les Paul
guitar. You can break away the neck and add new face plates,
which is really cool. I would love to have a sweet metal face
plate on mine and the $15 and under price tag is worth it I
think. Breaking away the neck to the guitar is a great idea,
easy to store and much easier to travel with, but when the
sensor chip gets a little dirty some of your buttons may not
work. Of course you can just give a quick cleaning and you are
good to go, you will be playing fine once again. When you really
think about it though this can be annoying, but I’ll look past
it for now since the Les Paul guitar feels and plays a lot
better than the old one.
Neversoft
felt the need to take away one multiplayer mode in Guitar Hero
3, but we’ve gained two more, co-op career and online play.
Playing through co-op career mode will unlock you even more
songs, which adds to the already high replay value. Online mode
however doesn’t allow you to play two player co-op career mode. What is
the logic in this? Hopefully if you have an extra guitar from
GH2 you can enjoy this mode in your house only, using a
controller in this game may unlock you an achievement, but it
isn’t worth it. Online play does seem difficult to get into
games with and a patch is already in the works. Out of the three
systems that have Guitar Hero 3 the Xbox 360 versions, the one
this review is based on, ranks supreme since you don’t have to
pray that one of your friends will find you online.
Final Verdict
It may seem like I hate Guitar Hero 3, but I really don’t, I
wanted everybody to know what has changed and how it affects the
game. We all love the Guitar Hero franchise, if it wasn’t for
these games nobody would ever spend a hundred dollars or more on
a single video game, sorry Sega but once again you were ahead of
your time with Samba de Amigo, people didn't want to play a
hundred dollars for a maraca game.. The minor game play flaws
can easily be fixed and the tracks in this game are awesome,
Metallica’s One is my favorite song to play in this game.
Neversoft did a good job with the series; all the problems this
game might be slacking on will most likely be over looked since
all anybody wants to do is rock out. It is too early to tell if
GH3 is the best guitar game out today but for now it defiantly
has that award.
Rating
8.75 out of 10
Guitar Hero 3 Official Trailer
