Guitar Hero 5: First Impressions

By Sebastiaan

I recently got Guitar Hero 5 for my birthday, the XBOX360 version, and I have been playing it, well, frankly, a LOT, especially since Sunday.

Now, I have played Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, with my brother, we finished all songs in the co-op career except for two songs. Then, after a few months, we got World Tour, including a new guitar, a drum-set and a microphone. We played hell out of it, I perfected a few songs, and went on-line with Live Gold after a few months, when the community was, well, dead, but still had a lot of fun. Then I decided it was time to get the new Guitar Hero, for that sole purpose: going on-line. And of course, the convincing set-list (Nirvana, Muse, 3 Doors Down, Johnny Cash, to name a few). Though as with each Guitar Hero, I know less songs than that I do know...

First thing we did when we got it, was play Ring of Fire, by Johnny Cash. I played straight on expert on guitar, my brother sang on expert as well, and my father did bass on easy. I really like the new Star Power system, you can synchronize activating it better, though it has a disadvantage - when a band member is in trouble, he can't spend your star power, as he could with World Tour, though this is easily solved. If one band member is struggling, his instrument 'breaks', and you have to convince the crowd in order to let him continue. If you use star power when convincing the crowd, hit a few notes, your friend can play along again.

Another big advantage for most gamers, is that all tracks are available from the start of the game. Still, I'm playing through career, just because I like the challenges, which are new as well. In career mode, each song has a challenge. This can be a challenge for guitar only, for the band as a whole, or for bass, drum or vocals. With this challenge you can win up to 3 extra stars, on top of the possible 5 (6 if you perfect a song, which I did for the first time today) stars you can win by playing well.

Multi-player offers a lot of cool game modes, which I haven't even played through yet, at least not all of them.

The fifth part of Guitar Hero doesn't contain a lot of difficult songs for me as an experienced Guitar Hero player, of the approximately 35 songs I've played so far, I could finish over 30 in my first try, and one in second, and well, only one or two I find too difficult and I'm too lazy to go into practice just yet... Though Judith by A Perfect Circle, which I find pretty brilliant, will be a challenge to complete on expert... And Santana will be a challenge as well, I think, though I haven't had the guts to try that one yet. A quick glance through the track list on quickplay taught me it's going to be a big nut to crack.

The complete list of songs in Guitar Hero 5 can be found here. A big plus for most of you will be that over half of the songs are from the last decade.

At the moment I have over 170 stars, of which I collected 150 in the last two days... I'm going to try and max it out, with help from my brother.

I really like this new game in the franchise, 10/10 in my opinion!