Guitar Hero: Aerosmith

July 8,2008 - If you’ve watched thirty seconds of television since June 29^th, chances are good that you've witnessed at least some advertising for RedOctane and Neversoft’s recent entry into the Guitar Hero franchise—Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. As a holdover for fans until Guitar Hero 4, Aerosmith doesn’t claim to be a revolutionary title for the series, but does it deliver enough content to justify its $100 price tag?

Like Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s did with Guitar Hero II; Aerosmith is built from the same engine as Guitar Hero III and contains all the same characters and buyable content. What obviously sets it apart is the emphasis on the band Aerosmith. While you’ll only get to play as three of the five members of the band due to the guitar/bass only restriction, the entire band was filmed for interviews about Aerosmith’s rise to fame that you’ll get to watch in cutscenes between venues.

The band’s ascent to stardom is as fun to watch as it is to hear their take on different venues, especially Nipmuc High School. The set list is also loosely based on songs the band performed or was inspired from the venues themselves. Each of the six set lists actually begins with two songs by bands other than Aerosmith, including Stone Temple Pilots, Ted Nugent, Cheap Trick and Run DMC. A little over 40 songs are included for play; 31 songs in the career mode, and 11 bonus songs that can be purchased from the vault. Each song has obviously been carefully analyzed to fit in with Aerosmith’s sound, and all of them are very fun to play.

Some slight yet key gameplay changes have been made to GH: Aerosmith. The first and most noticeable one is that hammer-ons and pull-offs are less “mushy” as promised. They are somewhere between GH II and III but leaning far more towards GH III in terms of their difficulty to hit. You need to be more accurate on your rhythm to hit them because holding the next color way before the gem onscreen reaches the bottom won’t register this time around.

Another change that you’ll realize as you breeze through the set list is that the difficulty has definitely been stepped down a notch from the sometimes impassible Guitar Hero III. Aerosmith was definitely intended as a game for fans of the band to play and enjoy, and we feel that RedOctane really nailed the difficulty with this one. There are no prohibitively hard songs to play like ones you might find near the end of GH III, but you’ll always feel challenged and engaged by the note combinations thrown at you.

Unfortunately, we have about as many criticisms of GH: Aerosmith as we do praise. For one thing, nothing at all was actually fixed from GH III. It’s still an exercise in frustration to find a match online, and you still can’t just join up with a buddy indefinitely to play some coop for as many songs as you’d like. For costing as much as Guitar Hero III did, Aerosmith feels awfully bare-bones. The “cooperative” mode of GH: Aerosmith isn’t so much a career with unique songs like it was in Guitar Hero III than just a set list containing all the songs you’ve beaten in single player that you and a buddy can play through at random, not earning any progress towards some sort of completion a la Guitar Hero II.

We must say that we were astounded by the amount of additional content purchasable in the vault; there are heap-loads of new and inventive guitars to choose from, including a replica of the black Les Paul guitar controller from GH: III. While it’s great to have so much variety to choose from; we’re not sure if we’ll ever get enough money from playing the campaign to actually be able to purchase every video, guitar, bass, finish, song, and character from the vault. This leaves us with a feeling of incompletion and a bit frustrated that we can’t get our hands on all the content in the game without starting a new career.

Neversoft and RedOctane played it safe by changing little to nothing in the Guitar Hero franchise with Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. It delivers an enjoyable experience that new and old players can get immersed it. While the developers managed to not screw anything up, they didn’t add any real value to the game either that made us feel it was worth every cent.

Games, News, Reviews, Media and More