When I thought about playing a guitar game, I questioned the idea’s ability to perform. Simply enough there have been a slew of videogames out in the arcades that played up to this type of game play. There have been games where you dance around on a mat, and other games that you would try and play a DJ, spinning discs at the right time. Because of all of this, I did not know how well this would float, considering how over used musical games are in the field. I can gladly say that I was wrong.

In Guitar Hero, you literally use a guitar as a controller. You have five fret buttons, a strum bar, and even a whammy-bar. After choosing your song and playing it, the fret buttons appear on the screen. Scrolling musical notes will line up with the fret buttons, and it is your job to match them up, and strum at the same time. On the easy mode, you start off with only needing to press three of the buttons, and on escalating difficulty you will need to use more. There are also considerable difficulty jumps made between each level you go through, but it only makes you a better player.

Some notes will have you needing to just hold down for a quick strum, while others will be elongated, and you will need to hold them down for the entire length. Some will be decorated with stars. If you hit all of the ones in a session that have stars, you will increase your star power. Some of them will require you to use the whammy bar to get the most star power possible out of an elongated cord. There is also a “Star Power” bar, which requires you to have at least half of it filled up before using it to double your multiplier.

After hitting 10 consecutive cords you will increase your multiplier by one automatically, but the maximum natural multiplier you can achieve is 4X. If you miss any notes from that point on, all of your multiplier is reset, so you will need to start all over again. The multiplier heavily affects your score so it is important to try and keep your multiplier as high as possible. Also since when you use your star power it doubles up your multiplier, so it is best to wait till you have 4X to activate it. The score is very important, as the higher the score you receive during a set, the more stars you can get.

When you make a mistake on the guitar your Rock meter will go down. It will make a horrible plucking noise that is irritating. I had hoped that it would still allow you to play the note, even if it was on a different cord. The same could be also said on late cords as well. When the cords are missed, it the music partly stops, so you can really feel that you are at fault.

There are three levels of the meter, and they are red, yellow, and green. When you are flashing red you are about to be booed off the stage so it is really important to start hitting the notes the best you can. Also if you use your Star power, the notes you do hit will propel you dramatically higher on the Rock meter.

Each set you play is gauged out of five stars. When you are playing the career mode, you are paid based upon how many stars you achieve in a song, then paid accordingly. The money you are paid helps you unlock items in a store. There are many things to unlock, from guitars, guitar skins, extra songs, to extra characters. This is one of the best features of the game, as you can unlock more great hits, customize your characters, or even unlock the Grim Reaper, and rock out as him.

There is also a separate mode called Quick Mode that you can play just for a high score. In this one you play by yourself trying to get the top score against all other previous recorded scores. Once score is then recorded, and you can even enter your own name to be immortalized. What is disappointing is that any scores you get in the career mode are not carried over into the scoreboard, so this feature is fairly limited, especially when you are just working on trying to unlock everything through the career mode. Another thing that I detest is how you are forced to unlock things multiple times. On each difficulty other than easy because there is no shop to access there, you must unlock everything again. So when going through normal, hard, and legend you will need to spend just as much time unlocking everything, which is a huge pain in the butt.

Something this game is fantastic at is getting a lot of good songs to play with. The game has a great array of diverse games that will challenge you from the start to the end. There are hits from Black Sabbath, like Iron Man, or if you want to take an Ozzie song along you can play Bark at the Moon. There are also hits from Queen, Boston, ZZ Top, Queens of the Stone Age, Incubus, Megadeth and Jimi Hendrix. They even had one of my favourite songs of all time, Heart Full Of Black by Burning Brides. The music is so good that I hope they release a soundtrack for the game.

From playing a lot of the DDR games, I expected them to only be snippets of the music, but you are playing the entire song. This was something that I really liked, but really hated at the same time. Yes, it was great playing a song all the way through it, but after a while your finger can become rather sore. I hoped they could have given an option to toggle between the two and let the player decide which they would like to play. On the note of sore fingers, I also had hoped for an endless mode, where you could just ramp through the songs without stopping, which seems to be more of a Rock Star style.