Its new button configuration fundamentally transforms how the game plays, and delivers some desperately needed innovation to a stagnant genre. Thankfully, Live's other major change pretty much single-handedly redeems the entire game. The new guitar features two buttons side by side on each of the first three frets. I appreciate Live's attempt to do something truly different-and this new approach did provide a few memorable moments late in the campaign-but the execution spoils what was potentially a cool idea. Couple that with the obnoxious announcers and bland, and pointless fake Tweets that pop up between songs, quickly the presentation becomes grating. If you nail every single note for 90 percent of a song but somehow screw up the outro, the video still switches over to the negative take, leaving you to face jeers from the crowd and dirty looks from your band as the next song loads up. Depending on your performance, you're either an irredeemable embarrassment or an untouchable rock god. Now Skrillex, on the other hand.Īnd weirdly, crowd reactions come in just two flavors: good and bad. Now Playing: Guitar Hero Live - Video Review Yes, that's a banjo in the background, but hey, at least it's kind of like a guitar. It's so campy it borders on parody.īy clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's Every single person smiles aggressively with canned enthusiasm while uncomfortably mugging the camera and giving you the most comically exaggerated thumbs up you've ever seen. The game absolutely trips over itself to sell you on the idea that you're a totally super cool rockstar. Everything from the costumes to the acting to the unskippable concert intros feels painfully forced and inauthentic. And when I did notice, I frequently cringed. In theory this should immerse players in the fantasy of playing in front of thousands of fans, but I was generally too focused on the gameplay to notice everything happening in the background. The first of the game's two completely separate experiences is simply called Live, presumably because underneath its standard note highways, it uses real actors and a first-person camera to make players feel as though they're really standing onstage. Some of these new ideas work beautifully, while others fail miserably, which makes Guitar Hero's long-awaited return a consuming, often overwhelming sequence of incredible highs and unbearable lows. And it delivers new music through a freemium-style service rather than simply selling individual tracks.

Its guitar trades the long-standing five button layout for three pairs of buttons stacked on top of each other. Its visuals rely primarily on live action footage rather than traditional game graphics.

Guitar Hero Live is a complex machine with many moving parts and a lot of new ideas.

Gamestop guitar hero live