Guitar Hero: Aerosmith

"Despite not living up to the bar set by its predecessors, this is still a worthy addition to the Guitar Hero library."

If you've ever played Guitar Hero, then you know how I'm going to open this review. If you don't, then read on.

The concept of Guitar Hero is quite simple in its structure, but complex in its execution. Using a plastic guitar, you press any of five buttons on the neck of the guitar and strum the strum bar just like you would a real guitar. The idea is to match your strumming and button-pushing to a stream of notes that's coming at you on the screen, while a rock and roll song plays in the background (giving the effect of the player actually playing the songs that are in the game).

The Guitar Hero games come in four difficulties: Easy, which only utilizes the first three buttons, green-red-yellow; Medium, which introduces the blue button; Hard, which introduces the orange button; and Expert, which has you playing pretty much the exact guitar line. The complexity of the songs increases as you increase the difficulty. The idea is to hit as many notes as you can during the song in order to make it all the way to the end. The more notes you hit in a row, the more your score multiplier increases. Hit certain phrases within the song and you accumulate Star Power, a function which will double your multiplier for a time.

This is the simple-sounding structure of Guitar Hero, but for anyone who's actually played the game, it can be a real challenge to get the highest scores possible.

The Guitar Hero franchise has spawned four console versions before this: Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero II, and Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s for PS2 (GH2 and 80s are also available on XBox 360), as well as Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock for the PS3, PS2, Wii, 360, and PC. Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is the fifth console installment of the franchise.

As befits the title, this installment focuses mostly on the music of Aerosmith, one of the more popular American rock-and-roll bands in history. This game takes you to six of Aerosmith's most influential venues (including Max's Kansas City and half-time of a football game (you probably know which one)) while playing some of Aerosmith's most popular songs, including "Dream On", "Back in the Saddle", "Train Kept A Rollin", and "Walk This Way" (both the original and Run DMC versions). This game also features songs from artists such as Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and Ted Nugent. All told, there are 41 songs to be had on this disc, about 70% of which are from the Boston rockers.

Each of the six venues features five songs. In order to progress through the game, you must complete the two "opening act" songs in order to unlock the Aerosmith songs; you must complete the two Aerosmith songs to unlock the Aerosmith encore, and then complete the Aerosmith encore to move on to the next location. Your performances will earn you game currency, which you can then use in the bonus area titled the "Vault" to unlock the bonus Aerosmith/Joe Perry Project songs, additional themes and guitars for the non-Aerosmith characters, additional playable characters, additional videos, and the like.

In addition to the single-player career, the multi-player modes from Guitar Hero III return for Aerosmith, with the one major upgrade being the ability in Pro Face-Off mode to select different difficulties. In GH3, you had to specify a uniform difficulty for PFO matches; here, you can set one player at a lower difficulty than the other. Battle and Co-Op modes also return, which is important because one of the objectives on the sixth and final tier is a guitar battle in the model of Tom Morello, Slash, and Lou the Devil from GH3. (You should only need one guess to figure out who you'll be battling in this game.)

As you can clearly see thus far, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is largely built on the foundation set by Guitar Hero III, with a few major changes. As players of GH3 will probably recognize, the hammer-on and pull-off system (a function whereby you don't have to strum certain strings of notes displayed with white circles) is extremely wide-open and forgiving in GH3. Neversoft, the developers of GH3 and GH: Aerosmith, have gone to great lengths to tighten the HOPO window in this new installment. The window during which you can strum notes, however, is largely untouched, giving a certain advantage to strumming notes as opposed to HOPOing notes (at least, in my opinion).

Guitar Hero: Aerosmith supports online play as does its predecessor; however, one major online option has been removed. In GH3, you had the options to create your own match, jump immediately into a match, or search the available matches. In GH: Aerosmith, you do not have the option to search available matches; you can only create a match or join a match that meets criteria you set (for example, if you want to play a 3-song co-op session, you tell the computer you want 3-song co-op and it automatically throws you into the first available match that meets those criteria). In GH3, you had some ability to search the available matches and only pick out matches against certain players; this ability is largely lost in GH: Aerosmith.

Graphically, this game falls short of GH3's precedent. The Boston rockers are fairly well-rendered, but the game suffers from a bit of slow-down in the background animations where the band is playing, the camera pans the crowd, and so on (fear not; the fret-board still runs at a smooth 60 fps...at least that's what I think it is). I've also noticed that during certain close-up shots of the crowd, the couple of people that are closest to the camera suffer from moderate pixelation.

However, this is all background; most players would probably focus more of their attention on the fretboard. Here's where I have my biggest complaint.

As a matter of personal preference, I use the Casey Lynch character when I play Guitar Hero 3 and Aerosmith. Her fret-board design is a nearly-solid black, which allows me to clearly see the notes coming at me. In GH: Aerosmith, when playing Aerosmith songs, you are forced to use
Joe Perry and his fret-board (which makes sense, since Joe Perry's the guitarist for the title band). My problem is with Perry's fret board, which is not solid-black, but more of a grayish tinge with alternating skulls on the board. This may not sound too bad, but I've been victimized by more than one yellow note that ends up hiding itself on one of these skulls and going by without me noticing. Often, a stray orange will slip past me too, but these are not as frequent as the yellows. I'd advise you to keep a very close eye out during the Aerosmith songs so that you are not similarly victimized in this matter.

As far as the music itself goes, it's largely the music of Aerosmith. All the Aerosmith songs in the game are "master tracks", recordings by the original artists. In most cases, the master tracks are the original studio recordings; however, there are some re-recorded versions of songs available in this game along the lines of the Sex Pistols' re-recording of "Anarchy in the U.K." and the "Cult of Personality" re-recording by Living Colour present in GH3. In particular, "Mama Kin" is a 2007 re-recording by Aerosmith, and the version of "Cat Scratch Fever" found here is not the original studio track, but a subsequent recording by Ted Nugent.

The non-Aerosmith songs in the game are pretty much split in half between master tracks and covers, and an interesting addition on this front is Neversoft's disclosure of who actually covered the song. You'll be able to see during the song intro who covered which particular songs, whether it's Wavegroup (largely responsible for the covers in GH2) or Steve Ouimette (the architect of the metal version of Devil Went Down to Georgia featured in GH3). Another interesting new feature of this game that I've noticed is crowd sing-alongs. During certain encore songs (notably the Run DMC version of "Walk This Way" and "Dream On"), you'll be able to hear the crowd in attendance singing along to the chorus segments of the songs. It's an interesting effect that really adds to the rock concert atmosphere of these games.

However, your ultimate enjoyment of the sounds of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith will depend on your opinion of Aerosmith the band. The score I offer below for sound and music is based on my opinion of Aerosmith (for the record, I look upon Aerosmith with a certain level of favor that some might not); if you do not like Aerosmith, then your sound rating will probably be a lot lower than mine.

Now, to the scores.

Difficulty: 5/10. This is probably the easiest of the five GH games out for consoles so far. The well-skilled Guitar Hero players out there will blaze through this game with little difficulty; the less-skilled will find this to be a very beatable game but will still enjoy doing it.

Multiplayer and Online: 7/10. Pretty much unchanged from GH3, although points get deducted for the lack of choice in one's online opponents.

Sound and Music: 9/10. The preponderance of master tracks in this game is definitely a good thing, and my high opinion of Aerosmith adds to my rating here. As I said, adjust your rating accordingly based on your Aerosmith opinion.

Repeatability: 8/10. This is also dependent on your opinion of Aerosmith and how often you want to re-play these songs in order to get the highest scores possible and/or perform perfect runs on the songs. The four difficulty levels extend things a bit for the new players, but the skilled plastic-guitar players out there will likely jump to Expert, zip through everything, and cast this aside for the bigger challenges that are manifested in the earlier games.

FINAL RECOMMENDATIONS: If you're a fan of Guitar Hero, then this is a worthy addition to your
library. If you're a fan of Aerosmith, then this is a nice, safe way to introduce yourself to the Guitar Hero phenomenon (as long as you don't mind dropping $100 on the game-guitar bundle). If you're a fan of both, then this is a must-buy. If you don't like Aerosmith, then you probably won't even read my review; however, if you still read this, then it's up to you whether to get this game solely for the non-Aerosmith tracks. If that's your basis, then this is probably a game to pass up, simply because of how much Aerosmith dominates the game.

FINAL AVERAGE SCORE: 7.25/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/01/08

Game Release: Guitar Hero: Aerosmith (US, 06/29/08)