In a futile effort to play games before they go offline, I finished
Guitar Hero Live (2015, Wii U) today.
I'm pretty sure this one absolutely bombed at retail, because I got it last year for like 5$. It's a bit of a deviation from the last Guitar Hero I played (the third one, Legends of Rock). You no longer play as cartoony characters; the developer instead has staged quite a few different shows with real crowds, so you play from a first-person perspective in this FMV-type game, with real crowds and actors playing bandmates.
Presentation has also really been cleaned up, it's a lot sleeker in menus and even the note ribbon's look is less colourful/garish. The game has 2 modes now, a campaign of around ~45 songs, and a (now defunct) MTV-esque mode which would play a good 400 music videos over streaming that you could drop into at any time.
The Live mode, which was discontinued late last year, was pretty fun. Ideal for casual play, really, but the music selection was pretty lacking in certain genres. Finding hip-hop is pretty rare for example, but also the punk and metal selections have suffered from an influx of more modern pop-rock stuff. The electronic music is all EDM/dubstep stuff too, Modestep, Skrillex, and the like. You'd think Daft Punk, Fatboy Slim and Chemical Brothers would be the obvious choices there, but apparantly not.
Since you play along to music videos this mode had a bit less personality than the campaign, too, but it's a neat idea - bummer that it ended.
The campaign meanwhile is themed around 2 music festivals, where you play as fictional (cover?)bands. It's pretty well done, settings vary from basements and secret VIP shows, to folksy gardens full of bearded hipsters, rock venues, stages with lots of LEDs for rave music, and even a massive mainstage. It's pretty incredible the amount of work that must've went into these video productions; even the flight cases are labeled.
That said, there's a certain inherent FMV-goofiness about the whole thing. Particularly the signs in the crowd are way too generic ("rock stars!", "so excited!"), and there's a bit too many fashionable people backstage instead of grumpy audio techs and production assistants.
Overall though, this style of presentation really works quite well. It's especially effective when you're doing poorly and bandmates scowl at you or demand you get back in the groove, because it feels like you're letting real people down. Crowds throwing toilet paper is maybe a bit excessive for a missed solo, but maybe that's common in Colorado.
I did have some trouble adjusting to the new guitar controller, since they moved from 5 rows of notes to 3, but there's 6 buttons now since notes can come down in either black or white varieties. It does feel a bit more like playing actual guitar now, because sometimes you need to combine notes from different colours to form chords. But it also leads to a bit more of a learning curve. There's also some calibration difficulties which have to do with input lag - but the game has lots of options to counteract this.
The difficulties don't feel 100% ideal though; the first 2 settings are real pushovers only using half the buttons, but on Normal they're already demanding quite complex combinations. Something in between would've been nice to start out on, to learn the new controller layout.
Songs are no longer played individually now, since you're performing short 3-5 song sets now. It's nice how things are themed around genres now, but that does lead to some wonky pacing. Quite complex stuff like Skrillex (where you have no idea what instrument you're meant to be playing) and Halestorm come quite early in the campaign, whereas in the back half you get a real snoozefest hipster garden event which basically relegates you to rhythm guitar. I also kinda miss a really tough song to end on, perhaps during credits; Queen isn't exactly DragonForce in that regard.
Should you play Guitar Hero Live? With the Live mode gone, you're left with a ~3 hour campaign, and the songs rather vary in quality. Less classics, a bit more pop, electronic and folksy stuff. I like that they moved away from having exclusively metal/punk/rock stuf to vary things, but that also means there's less of every genre. The new controller works pretty well in offering a different challenge than previous outings, but I think this mostly appeals to people who like replaying songs for high scores and leaderboards (those still work) a lot.
4/5 Stars, bummer this direction didn't pan out for the franchise.
Topic: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions? (Read 637634 times)
