The latest edition to the Guitar Hero franchise has been released this week, and it can only be described in one word really, ‘Wow!’ When Activision first announced their lineup for 2009, I was surprised because they were releasing so many new Guitar Hero games and I was concerned that they wouldn’t really be up to good standards if they were releasing so many. However, they have proven me wrong with this latest release.

For Activision, the new Guitar Hero 5 game is the latest ‘template’ for their upcoming games, what this means is that all the smaller games made from now on will be built from this latest game, which is great. Previously, the template for their games had been Guitar Hero World Tour, which if you have read my previous posts, you’ll know that I hated that game and they did a terrible job of it. But with this one, they have really excelled.

There is so much to talk about with this new game so I’ll begin with the menu screen. Not something normally you would talk about in a game review, but this one is quite interesting. When you load up the game, a song begins to play in the background and if all you want to do is jump into the excitement, just simply press the yellow button and you’ll be able to start playing that song. You don’t even have to do it by yourself, at any point, your mates can jump in and out of the song. Once your done, you can return to the menu screen, press Start and get the proper menu.

Moving on, the career starts off not too different to the other games, where you get to choose a character, or make one, then make your band. However, in Guitar Hero 5, not only can you make a new character, you can use your Xbox 360 avatar to play in-game. This fun addition to the game brings your avatar to life as they rock along to all the songs.

As I was initially creating a new character, one thing I noticed was that as  I was equipping my character with armour, as normal musicians do, I realised I wasn’t actually paying for this stuff. So after playing one song, I found that you don’t actually earn any money. I think this must be the first Guitar Hero game to not actually reward you with cash for completing songs.

The whole way the career is setup is basically the same as the other games, there are a number of different sections, each one containing 4-5 songs, plus a couple of encore songs. So not much has changed in the way you play the career, but what you are awarded has, quite significantly. I’ve already said that you don’t get money, but the other difference is that you can, potentially, get more stars than normal. In previous games, you could only get a maximum of 5 stars and then gold stars if you got 100%, but in this game, if you get 100%, you get a 6th star. That’s not it though. For each song, there is a challenge which you have to complete with a specific instrument. For example, some of the guitar challenges include getting a certain note streak or holding a 4x multiplier for a certain number of seconds.

Each challenge is split into 3 different rankings, going from gold to diamond and for each rank, you gain an extra star. So, potentially, if you were to get 100% in the song, then complete the full challenge, you will earn yourself 9 stars, a whole 4 more than any other game on the market.

This doesn’t really make any change to the game, but it does make you want to earn as many stars as possible, especially as there is an Xbox 360 achievement for every few hundred stars, with the final achievement for a massive 808 stars.

That’s pretty much it for the career, now onto the Quickplay feature. In previous games, you would have had to complete the entire career to be able to unlock all the songs. However, Guitar Hero 5 is the first game where you don’t have to do that. As soon as you load up the game, without even starting the career, you can play any song from the 85 strong set list you want in the Quickplay mode. That’s not the only change though. In other games, to start playing the songs, you would have to get everyone who was playing ready to go before starting the song, but with this game, any of your mates can jump in and out of the song, at any time, and not effect anyone else while doing so.

The final new addition to the game involves pretty much all of the sections of the game.  If you’re always having trouble choosing between your mates which instrument to play, as nobody really wants to play bass, then all these problems have been solved. You can now play any song with any combination of instruments, if you’re friends are all drummers or all guitarists, no worries, you can all play at once, just aslong as you have the kit to play it.

Now moving onto the graphics. The Guitar Hero team have done a great job improving the graphics all round. Each of the characters look extremely detailed and just better quality.  In previous games, the graphics had been quite poor, all the characters looked poorly done and the crowd had about 5 people just repeated so they all pretty much looked the same. Although I don’t think they have changed the crowd too much, they have slightly blurred the crowd from view and you see less of them so it doesn’t look as bad, nice tactic by Activision.

As with the majority of the Guitar Hero games, some special musical figures have been included in the game. Some of them in Guitar Hero 5 include Carlos Santana, Johnny Cash, Matthew Bellamy, as well as a number of others. Although a huge amount of time has been spent getting these characters to look really life like, and a good job has been done, some controversy has surrounded one of these characters, Kurt Cobain. Members of Nirvana and Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, have made complaints about the character’s use, despite Love giving consent to use the image. Nothing has really come from Activision yet so it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

Summary

Overall this is one of the best Guitar Hero games ever released. Not only does it come with the largest setlist to date, it has a huge range of new features which have risen the game above all the competitors. Aslong as Activision provide a good online download service, I think this game could be the best so far.

It’s just a shame that the new drum kit wasn’t released with Guitar Hero 5 and not released with Band Hero later in the year, that would have made this release even better.

Good Points = Improved graphics, huge setlist, great new features, jump in and out of songs, no need to unlock songs for quickplay.

Bad Points = None!

I give this game a 10/10.

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