Guitar Hero 5 Review

Guitar Hero 5 is the fifth GH game that Neversoft has built from the ground up and it seems as if they are finally getting the hang of the idea.

However, even though the many changes are very welcome to the franchise, 5 is literally choked to death by its lack of progression in one VERY important area, lag management.

GH: World Tour introduced full band play to the GH formula.  If that sounds alot like Rock Band you would be right.

World Tour was a Guitar Hero-fide Rock Band that added very little to the genre.  The biggest thing was the open bass note.  Its a year later and Guitar Hero 5 is out and Neversoft has pulled every bell and whistle they can think of out of the bag to throw into it.

The gameplay hasn’t drastically changed, you still use fake plastic instruments to hit notes that roll down the highway and your score and success is based on the number and percent of notes that you hit.  What is new are the multiple game modes and party-centric playing.

The first thing GH5 does when you boot it up is load a random song from the setlist and play it for you jukebox style.  From there you have the option to jump into the song immediately, listen to it or go to the main menu.  The idea is that, if you are having a party, you don’t have the time to be organizing difficulty levels, character selection, and whatnot, when you could just be rocking.

This part Neversoft gets right very right.  A player can jump in and out of a song in this mode at anytime, on any instrument.  This just made Guitar Hero house parties alot easier.

More new features include the option to play any song with any combination of instruments.  If you have 4 guitars, 4 people can play guitar, if you have 4 mics GH5 turns into a huge karaoke game, and heaven help you if you have 4 sets of drums.

This extends to online play as well and can take the headache out of arguing over who has to play bass or if you have a house full of guitarists, they all get to play the 6 string.

An addition to the career mode is new instrument specific challenges that have you performing specified tasks in song to earn gold, platinum, or diamond records.  Some examples are, hit a 150, 250 or 400 note streak, or refill your star power 75%, 150%, or 225% during a song.

Each of the songs in career have a challenge attached to them, with the only catch being that each challenge requires you to be playing a specific instrument.  The benefit of this mode is two fold.  It encourages players to play on more than one instrument and keeps players from having to play through an entire career mode on every instrument (Yes, I’m looking at you Guitar Hero: Smash Hits).

The soundtrack is solid.  You get everything from Bob Dylan, to The White Stripes, but it does sometimes feel that track list is trying too hard to name drop than it is to be cohesive.

Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire seems way out of place and so does his digitized character.  Witch also brings mention to the ability to play as any of the characters on any instrument on any song.  So, during Bring the Noise Kurt Cobain, Shirley Manson, or any of the other famous talent can be seen doing the “cool rap” gestures of Flavor Flav.  Check out what I mean in this video depicting the aforementioned Cobain doing all kinds of that’s way out of character.

The note tracks are more forgiving through the game and over all, just make more sense.  However, the margin of error on the individual notes has been shortened.  So, anyone who is used to hitting all their notes a bit late and still getting credit for them will have to adjust their play style.  This topic naturally bring us to the biggest and most embarrassing flaw in GH5, the lag calibration.

Let’s lay some ground work.  Last year with Rock Band 2, Harmonix, introduced a self-calibrating guitar.  This was the most revolutionary addition to last year’s music games.

It took the human element out of the calibration process, removed excuses for sucking, and almost single-handedly made Rock Band 1 and Guitar Hero World Tour almost obsolete.  Lag had been a problem since the first Guitar Hero, and with the invention of the new guitar, should have been a thing of the past.

Now, since Metallica and Smash Hits were built on the World Tour engine, it makes sense for them not to have the new feature built in, but to have the first proper GH game after the release of Rock Band 2, not have this function is a gross miscalculation of the importance of lag management.

In addition to that, the GH5 lag calibrator has been modified to rely even more heavily on human error.  Rather than strumming to the sound you hear (as you do in previous games), you have to manually change the calibration to match audio and visual queues.

You tell me…can the human eye really tell the difference between a 10ms lag and a 20ms lag…I don’t think so.  After calibrating on the new tool, you will do fine on the early songs in the game but once you pass halfway frustration will set in and the tiny error you made in the lag calibration will infuriate you more and more.  Knowing that you are better than how you are performing will leave a terrible taste in your mouth.

Don’t get me wrong, outside of the lag, GH5 could be the best Guitar Hero game ever made.

There is avatar support for the 360 and DS support for the Wii, but to be fair I played the PS3 version (so I’ll stay away from reviewing console specific features).

Including an import option for some of the tracks from World Tour, and Smash Hits is a plus and support for the World Tour DLC helps make GH5 a great value, but if you can’t enjoy the game because of wacky audio setups, then your experience will be tainted.

(3.5/5) Stars (BTW: I deducted an entire star for the lag problems)