Review: ‘Guitar Hero Live’ shreds the past, but breaks a few strings

The second verse is definitely not the same as the first.

This is the highest praise I can heap upon Guitar Hero Live. The first Guitar Hero in five years takes a different route to the stage than its forbears and its recently released competitor, Rock Band 4. Where Rock Band 4 plays to your sense of nostalgia with gameplay rooted firmly in the past, Guitar Hero Live targets your sense of musical adventure with an entirely new approach, from the way it delivers music to the innovative build of its signature plastic instrument.

The trouble is, a mediocre new song isn’t necessarily better than a great oldie. And while there is much to admire about Guitar Hero Live’s daring comeback, there’s much to loathe, too.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

The core will be familiar to anyone who has fake-rocked in the past decade: you bang away at a plastic guitar as notes slide down the screen. But forget other instruments; Guitar Hero Live focuses its efforts almost entirely on a brand new guitar peripheral. All that plastic you might have stashed in the garage should be summarily chucked, because none of your old gear is compatible with the new game.

[Related: 'Rock Band 4' puts on a good show]

There’s a reason for that. The new guitar features a different layout than the iconic five colored buttons. Now it’s six uncolored buttons laid across three frets: three buttons on top, three on the bottom. While this might sound like a subtle shift, it leads to a pretty big change to the way you play.

For real-world guitarists, the new hand positions will feel simultaneously comfy and foreign. Experienced Guitar Hero players should learn the game’s new vocabulary in an hour or so, though it will take a few days before you’re anywhere near ready to crank up the difficulty. But when you do (and start dealing with complex chords that span the two rows), Guitar Hero Live occasionally feels like you’re actually playing a guitar.

It’s not perfect — sacrificing the two buttons higher up means you also lose the guitar god feel of sliding your hand up the neck to hit those glorious Brian May high notes — but I appreciate the new layout and admire Activision and developer FreeStyle Games for having the nerve to innovate here. I picked up Rock Band 4 and was playing on Expert within 20 minutes; I’ve yet to get there after a week with Guitar Hero Live. It’s a much-needed new learning curve and a refreshing change for the genre.

Live and Let Die

Unfortunately, some of Guitar Hero Live’s other changes don’t fare so well. Take, for example, the “Live” single-player campaign.

This mode takes you through two giant outdoor festivals in the U.S. and U.K. You’re the guitarist in a variety of fictional bands; your band mates are anonymous, real-world musicians doing their best rock star impersonations. You play in front of massive crowds filled with actors holding up signs that say things like “Excited” and “Whoops” and “Fresh” and “Tonight Is Epic,” because those are exactly the sorts of signs people hold up at real rock concerts, according to a 250-page report someone at Activision compiled about the Behavior of Music Fans at Outdoor Concerts.

You experience this from a first-person view — you ARE the guitarist — which makes it feel like a cheesy early 1990s full-motion video game, but instead of celebrating the cheese factor, it’s uncomfortably unaware of how lame it is. And worse, how little it makes you feel like an actual rock star, which is sort of the point of the entire game.

For instance, the crowd is obsessed with your performance. Hit lots of notes and play well and everyone will cheer you on. “GOOD JOB! YOU ARE PLAYING GREAT!” your singer says with his happy face and very un-rocking thumbs-up. But screw up and everyone’s mad. “STOP BLOWING IT, MATE!” your singer chides, while the groupie in the front row, who seconds before was throwing you appreciative devil horns, suddenly shakes her head and screams “OFF! OFF!” to shame you off the stage. Their attitudes shift back and forth frequently, especially if you struggle with certain song parts but excel at others.

It's ridiculous, and it draws you out of the experience. It’s hard to feel like a rock star — or even concentrate on hitting notes — when you sort of hate every person within 200 yards of the video game stage (though it was kind of awesome watching the fictional over-bearded hippie band Portland Cloud Orchestra get angry and yell at me when I mangled my way through Mumford and Son’s “I Will Wait.”)

The song list doesn’t help. It’s not that the 42 songs you’re forced to hammer through in Guitar Hero Live’s single-player mode are bad so much as a bad fit for a game primarily about being a great guitarist. Gone are the Guitar Hero II days of killer guitar songs like “Carry on my Wayward Son,” “Last Child” and “Hangar 18,” replaced instead with songs in which the guitar is an afterthought. Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats,” One Republic’s “Counting Stars,” Avril Levigne’s “Here’s to Never Growing Up,” The Lumineers’ “Hey Ho,” and Charli XCX’s “Famous” are fine but in no way memorable for guitarists. Even Skrillex’s energetic “Bangarang” isn't a song you want to play on guitar.

Rock Band gets away with having eclectic songs because it gives you legit gameplay if you choose drums, bass or vocals (Guitar Hero Live does support vocals if you plug in a mic, but it's mostly just to sing along; you can't embark on a career as a singer). Every song doesn’t need to have a strong guitar part. But Guitar Hero? It’s extremely important, and most of the 42 tracks you’re limited to play through in “Live” mode simply don’t make you feel like a shredder.

She Watch Channel Zero

But head over to “TV” mode and suddenly Guitar Hero Live starts to hum.

Here you’ll find 24 hours worth of streaming content spread across two ‘channels’ that just crank out song after song. Everyone online is playing the same song at the same time, turning each session into an impromptu score attack multiplayer match. The more you play, the cooler stuff you’ll unlock, including a variety of power-ups, different fretboards, and flashy badges. And instead of fake rockers in the background, you’ll play along to a music video. Remember those?

It’s good fun, and better still, includes a wealth of tracks not found in the solo mode. You’ll currently find over 200 songs spanning decades here, from classic like “More than a Feeling” to random 90s hits like “Hunger Strike” and heavy rockers like Audioslave’s “Cochise.” And of course, they’ll be adding more songs and channels over time. Why the rockingest tracks here didn’t show up in “Live” mode is a mystery.

You can access the full catalog for one-off songs, too, though in another break from tradition, playing any track on demand requires a play token. This is essentially a one-time rental; you don’t buy and download songs to play indefinitely. Sure to be the game’s most controversial feature, play tokens are earned in game at a fairly steady clip, or, naturally, can be purchased using real-world cash. I typically had a good dozen or so in the bank at any time, but throw a big Guitar Hero party and those will get eaten up in an hour. They offer a way around this with a $5.99 fee to access the entire catalog, but that only lasts for 24 hours.

I get the point — we live in a brave new world of Spotify and Apple Music, where no one really owns their music anymore — but stripping gamers of the ability to build a library they can come back to again and again stinks. It turns the game into a grind, requiring you to head back to the random songs in the channels to earn more tokens just so you can play the songs you want to play without having to pay. Call it what you want, but this is a microtransaction model at work, and it just feels needlessly worked in.

Guitar Hero Live is a classic rock star: talented, interesting, bipolar, and filled with questionable ideas. The new guitar is a hit and the streaming mode is plenty of fun, but the full-motion video fail and annoying song rental model mar what could have been a legendary comeback album.

What’s Hot: New guitar rocks; 24-hour streaming is impressive; great sense of progression in TV mode

What’s Not: Live mode is a dud; bad choice of on-disc songs; play tokens are lame

Platform reviewed: PS4

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