 Review By: Nick Arvites |
Developer: | Neversoft |
| Publisher: | Activision | |
| Genre: | Music | |
| ESRB: | Teen | |
| # Of Players: | 1-2 | |
| Online Play: | Yes | |
| Accessories: | Guitar, Xbox Live (online play, leaderboards) |
Activision’s Guitar Hero series is facing serious competition against the Rock Band platform. One of the ways Activision is keeping Guitar Hero distinguished from Rock Band is by announcing artist-specific titles. The first in this line of artist-specific titles is Guitar Hero Aerosmith. The game chronicles the career of Aerosmith, and gives Guitar Hero fans a new game’s worth of tracks to play. Naturally, at least to a gaming cynic like myself, the first question I had was if this was a cheap cash-in designed to milk the cash cow or another solid installment in a solid series. This review will examine Guitar Hero Aerosmith under that premise.
The Guitar Hero basics remain unchanged. You select a premade rocker for career mode, and you have to clear out a setlist in order to unlock more songs and a new venue. The core gameplay remains unchanged, although there is (thankfully) only one boss battle. Sets feature the generic Guitar Hero band playing two or three songs opening up for Aerosmith. Once those songs are cleared, you get to play a few Aerosmith tracks and an encore. The venues are taken out of Aerosmith’s past, culminating with their induction in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The opening act songs are master recordings except in four instances, which is a huge plus considering some of the past covers in the Guitar Hero series have bordered on sacrilege.
The single player mode follows Aerosmith’s career. Each act is spliced with documentary-styled video-interviews with the band talking about various phases in their career. These segments are obviously fluffed and don’t have any dirty laundry. If you’re looking for tales of fighting, drugs, women, and that stretch where Joe Perry quit, wait until there’s a rerun of Aerosmith: Behind the Music. The documentary segments do add a bit of direction to the game, and I actually liked them better than GH3’s “sell your soul to the devil” bit. If anything, I wish they would have fleshed the between-act segments a little more. They gave the game some guidance and direction, and they give fans (and newcomers to the band) little tidbits about their history.
As you play through Aerosmith’s career, you get a good selection of tracks. The opening act tracks are actually pretty good. Part of me wonders why they weren’t just made available for one of the main Guitar Hero games. You get tracks by Joan Jett, Stone Temple Pilots, the Black Crowes, the Clash, Ted Nuget, Lenny Kravitz, the Cult, the New York Dolls, Cheap Trick, Mott the Hoople, and Run DMC. The tracks are actually all solid, but there’s only 11 non-Aerosmith bands in the game. There are 41 total songs. Twenty-five are Aerosmith songs, four are from Joe Perry’s solo album, and the remaining twelve are from the other acts listed above. For comparison, Guitar Hero III shipped with 73 songs before downloadable content, and Guitar Hero II shipped with 74 songs (Xbox 360 version) before downloadable content.
The track selection as a whole is good. The non-Aerosmith songs are all solid, and the Aerosmith selections are a great cross-section of the band’s catalog. Fans of the Alicia Silverstone video songs and I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing are going to be disappointed, as they’re not in the game. However, even a casual Aerosmith fan will recognize most of the songs. The difficulty curve isn’t as bad as other Guitar Hero titles, mainly because the genre never really changes and Aerosmith’s style of songs would normally be a mid-ranked song in a normal Guitar Hero game’s difficulty scale.
There is a multiplayer mode, but it isn’t available in career mode. This limits multiplayer to quickplay mode, which isn’t really a bad thing since I’ve found most of my Guitar Hero multiplayer sessions centered around quckplay mode.
The biggest problem with the game is depth. While the game is priced at $49.99, or $10 less than a standard game, it doesn’t really provide enough to lure in non-Aerosmith fans. If there were more non-Aerosmith tracks or a way to import the non-Aerosmith tracks to another Guitar Hero title (ala Rock Band’s platform strategy), this title would be recommended to everyone. That’s the entire problem with band-specific titles. If you aren’t a fan of the band, you’re really not going to get much value out of the product because there are only 11 non-Aerosmith songs.
Bottom Line:
If you are an Aerosmith fan, pick up this title. You’ll enjoy it and get some life out of it. If you’re not too big on Aerosmith, it might be worth renting or borrowing from a friend, but I can’t recommend it to non-Aerosmith fans. The artist-specific titles are entirely dependent on each person’s tastes. I enjoyed it (I like Aerosmith), but several of my friends didn’t since they really don’t listen to Aerosmith at all. It really is a shame that you can’t import the songs into Guitar Hero 3 (or the recently released World Tour) because the tracks are pretty good. This is what makes the Guitar Hero strategy frustrating. If I’m having a multiplayer session, I constantly find myself switching between three different titles to play the tracks we like. This just adds to the pile, and honestly I wonder if this couldn’t have just been offered as a DLC pack for an existing Guitar Hero game. I would have sacrificed the custom menus and documentary style videos if I could have just imported the tracks into an existing game so I wouldn’t have to switch discs.
Again, the best way to know if you should play this game is by knowing how much of an Aerosmith fan you are.
| Pros: | Cons: | Final Score: |
|---|---|---|
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| 7.5 |
Posted: 2009-02-22 13:49:50 PST