It’s hard to know where to start with this review. It’s another music game, it’s another spin off from Guitar Hero: World Tour which itself is a knock-off of Rock Band which is the spiritual sequel of Guitar Hero one and two and those were very similar to Guitar Freaks from Konami on the arcade! Confused? Well it gets worse. This game is a port of the best songs from the Guitar Hero games that just used the guitar so we can use other instruments in them…along with the guitar but based on the game engine and structure of World Tour and released as a full price game.
At it’s core Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits is a meaty track expansion to Guitar Hero: World Tour. The gimmick being that the tracks are all pulled from the Guitar Hero series before the addition of drums and vocals and have been updated to add these instruments in. Also if you strummed along to covers of those songs in the original games (mostly Guitar Hero 1 and 2 songs) then the master tracks are now present and all tracks have had their guitar note tracks rewritten. It’s very hard to complain about the track listing, which is a meaty 48 songs and offers a variety which is reminiscent of Rock Band with everything from Queen to Aerosmith to Nirvana. It being a compilation it doesn’t have the cohesion of a soundtrack pieces together with a theme in mind but the songs were clearly chosen to be fun to play instead of just popular and definitely benefit from the tougher note tracks on guitar. Despite this the lacklustre singing and drums in several tracks highlights the fact that they were chosen for the original game for being fun guitar tracks and don’t translate well for the full band experience, this is a minor gripe however and one that can be levelled at all music titles due to the nature of having songs made fun for each instrument and not necessarily fun for the whole band. Online play is identical to World Tour and the welcomed addition of all songs being available to quick play from the start makes it’s way from Guitar Hero: Metallica.
In terms of reviewing this title that’s pretty much all you can say. It’s Guitar Hero: World Tour with new songs. Some are hits, some are misses but there is guaranteed at least a handful of tracks everyone will enjoy and if you get 4 drunks around this you are guaranteed to have great fun. Unlike the Metallica spin off which had new features and enhanced drumming there are no new features in Greatest Hits and in terms of a gaming experience I’ve seen this before. It begs the question when reviewing a title like this is do you as a reviewer judge value or simply quality of the product? In terms of product quality you are looking at a robust package, highly similar to World Tour albeit lacking the compatibility with your World Tour DLC. Looking at the value of the package it’s hard not to call this a shameless cash in of the Guitar Hero brand and question the decision not to release these tracks as DLC.
The infrastructure is clearly there given the large number of songs available for download and being able to download the tracks you want would be better value for the consumer yet here we are with a disc and a full release. The future of the genre is surely the disc holding the structure of the game and you downloading your own custom soundtrack for the game, as such this feels like eight steps backwards for the sake of making money. As such it’s very hard to recommend this game to anyone. If you own World Tour then this simply doesn’t represent value for money, if you don’t own World Tour then the lack of DLC compatibility means that Greatest Hits misses out on all those songs right now on the marketplace and if you don’t like music games then this will not do anything to change your view. It’s sad because Greatest Hits is still fun, there are still quality songs on there and playing with plastic instruments is still appealing but if this release is indicative of the route the series is taking then it looks like Rock Band may be the future.
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