GUITAR HERO: WARRIORS OF ROCK REVIEW

GUITAR HERO: WARRIORS OF ROCK (2010)

* (out of four)

Developed By Neversoft
Published by Activision for Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii

For the long-running Guitar Hero series the writing's been on the wall for years: despite reviving and dominating the rhythm game genre during the mid-noughties, the series has floundered pathetically into the new decade with a stubborn refusal to evolve*, leaving superior rival series Rock Band to take the rhythm game crown while the once beloved precursor dies a sad, miserable death. With the upcoming Rock Band 3, developer Harmonix (the company who originally developed Guitar Hero) have evolved their groundbreaking series even further, offering a new instrument (the keyboard) as well as promising instrument tutorials in the form of a "pro" mode, using a real guitar, keyboard and drumkit to teach how to play the actual instruments through their game. In a morose attempt to distance themselves from this, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock goes the other direction, introducing a pitiful Brutal Legend-lite story mode which makes no sense alongside their sadly series-traditional poor gameplay and setlist.

For the uninitiated, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock is a rhythm game in which players simulate playing the guitar, base, drumkit or vocals from their choice of 93 songs, with difficulty ranging from Beginner to Expert+. The distinguishing feature from Rock Band and previous entries in the series is Quest Mode, in which players assume the role of several characters completing a story as disinteresting as it is poorly written: in order to save the Demigod of Rock, eight characters must be recruited to take on a mechanised creature called The Beast. The player must acquire these characters from venues playing parts of the setlist awkwardly aligned to the characters, and gameplay is changed introducing "powers" that each character has, changing the score and gameplay in mostly meaningless ways like additional multipliers.

Aside from further widening the gap between this series and Rock Band, the Quest Mode goes against the entire point of rhythm games, which is simply to "play" the songs that you like: because songs are unlocked through this campaign, much of the music is cut off until the mode is completed. Forcing a barrier to playing songs from the setlist whilst excluding "cheats" to unlock all songs and play "No Fail" is an awful design choice. Further, pressing through the entire campaign is an arduous task due to the mass of unlistenable music on offer; whereas the upcoming Rock Band 3's broad setlist offers something for everyone, Warriors of Rock offers little for anyone. The setlist is padded out with unlistenable garbage no one in their right mind has ever heard of, with even better and known songs, such as Muse's Uprising and Nine Inch Nail's Wish, implemented in a way that they are not fun to play. This is really compounded by something like Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, in which the piano parts are awkwardly forced onto guitar - better just to wait for Rock Band 3 which features the song with an actual keyboard to play. In fact nearly any song on offer that you'd want to play is already available in the rival series, which took the much smarter move of making each non-band-specific game a platform rather than an entry into the series: Rock Band 2 allowed the import of all of the original Rock Band music in addition to literally thousands of downloadable songs available through DLC and the Rock Band Network. With Warriors of Rock, the issues with exporting songs from the previous games (why licence only a dozen songs from an 80-song game?) means anyone unfortunate enough to have fallen prey to this series instead of jumping onto the Rock Bandwagon is stuck with what amounts to a pitiful selection of songs, most of which suck.

Beyond this, Warriors of Rock suffers from the same issues as the last few games in the series. Anyone with an expensive audio-visual set up will be frustrated by the fact that Guitar Hero's calibration system does not work, keeping the same moronic manual set-up that demands the player to input the approx amount of lag there might be between controller and TV. (Tip: use the values that Rock Band's automatic callibration outputs.) The difficulty of the game is entirely broken: whereas Beginner is impossible to fail, Expert+ is basically impossible, falsifying difficulty featuring notes that aren't actually there. The system is unbalanced in that there's no way to grow as a player from Beginnner through to Expert+, unlike the perfect difficulty in Rock Band that introduces new players and allows them to grow through to a one-to-one Expert difficulty, that just makes sense.

For what little it's worth, the online multiplayer works fine and the graphics look just as good as you'd expect from a high budget title. But there's no getting around the fact that Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock is awful, and awful enough to end the series. Any benefits and goodwill earnt from the surprisingly competent but lackluster Guitar Hero 5** are squandered due to inexcusable design choices and the ongoing refusal to progress and grow. Yes, every other sentence in this review makes a comparison to Rock Band, but there's no way around that: Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock is inferior in every way to its competitor and it doesn't sadden me to see it kill the series. My happy memories of the first three games will not be tarnished, rather complimented by the natural evolution that has made Rock Band the amazing and groundbreaking juggernaut that it is.
 

* It's possible, maybe even highly likely, that without the substantial popularity and subsequent threat that the Rock Band series presented other instruments may never have been added to the Guitar Hero franchise.

** It might be worth noting that Guitar Hero 5's surprise popularity mostly arose from the fact that it didn't suck nearly as hard as Guitar Hero World Tour.