Ever since Activision took over the Guitar Hero series, they’ve been constantly compared to Harmonix, the originators of the franchise. Because of the very competitive nature of the current music game market, any new entry in the genre has been met with high expectations and little tolerance for mediocrity. Each new game needs to have lots of new features, a killer song list, and sturdier, more responsive plastic instruments with which to play.

After last year’s Guitar Hero: World Tour brought the series into the “full band game” fold, Activision have had plenty of time to evaluate where they succeeded and failed with it and craft a better experience for Guitar Hero 5. They were able to do this in many regards, but the game does still have a few critical shortcomings.

The day the music died

The biggest and most important flaw in GH5 is the song list. It just isn’t there. Sure, there are the classics from Nirvana, Johnny Cash, and Bon Jovi, but for each of the “essential” music game songs there are two that nobody has ever heard of. This really kills the excitement one usually experiences when unlocking a new setlist and saying “Oh man, I love that song!” Instead, it’s a game of “Well, let’s plow through these songs I don’t know and hope there’s something better in the next set.” In a music game, a lacking song list is suicide.

Contributing to this issue is the downloadable content being released for the game. It follows the same pattern the game does: Lots of stuff most people won’t care about, and a good track pack once a month or so. To be fair, Rock Band’s DLC has been a bit lacking lately too, but it’s more forgivable in their case due to the already massive library of songs available on their platform.

Oh, that reminds me! Wouldn’t it be awesome to have all the songs from the old Guitar Hero games available in GH5? That would help ease the pain of the new game’s musical shortcomings, right? Well, guess what! You certainly are able to import songs from previously-purchased Guitar Hero games into the new one! Thirty-five songs from World Tour, twenty-one from Smash Hits, and sixty-one Mom-Approved tracks from Band Hero featuring Taylor Swift’„¢. That’s 117 extra songs if you own all three of those games, about thirty of which you’ll probably want to play with any frequency.

Peripherally challenged

Speaking of Band Hero featuring Taylor Swift’„¢, it’s nice of them to include a new drum set in that instead of in Guitar Hero 5. Of course, how else will Activision get an extra two-hundred dollars from the people who wouldn’t otherwise go within fifty feet of that game?

To keep drummers happy, it seems that the “Expert +” difficulty that debuted in Guitar Hero: Metallica is here to stay. This mode basically adds in a second bass pedal, so you can try to reproduce some leg-shattering double-bass passages. I happen to have two different pedals (one that came with my Drum Rocker, and a Rock Pedal), and a friend loaned me a splitter so I could test them out on some of the harder songs. I goofed around with it for a bit, but kept getting double-kicks on one of the pedals which kept causing me to fail the songs I tried. I’d assume that it works a bit better with standard Guitar Hero pedals, but I can’t imagine playing some of the harder songs with a standard kit.

Activision are no strangers to fully-featured character creation tools, and they bring that expertise to Guitar Hero 5 to provide one of the, if not the single most advanced character creator in a music game yet. They give you an immense amount of customization options, so it’s not too difficult to make a really awesome (or really awful) representation of anyone you deem fit.

You must be this tall to play

It’s a good thing they have a good character creator too, because I definitely have a problem with the fact that you’re able to use your Xbox avatars as members of your band in this game. Unless you’re using an entire group of the little miscreants, the ones who are on stage look completely out-of-place, and honestly really damn creepy. It got to the point that I decided to stop using mine entirely, because I kept waking up at 3AM in a cold sweat.

While I have many issues with Guitar Hero 5, I will say that it has at least one long-overdue new feature that I expect to see in every music game going forward. Party Play is a new mode that lets up to four players jump into the game from the title screen / attract mode by simply pressing a button on their instrument of choice. You can jump into a song and leave at any point with no penalty, since the game isn’t too serious about keeping track of your score in this mode. You don’t earn any stars or rewards in Party Play, which makes it perfect to just let run when you’ve got some friends over.

One other thing that this game sets a good example in is its overall multiplayer experience. You’re not limited to one person per instrument, so nobody’s going to get stuck singing if they don’t want to. Hell, if you have four drum kits, go nuts! The bass is a lot more fun to play due to the addition of open notes, and each person can set their own modifiers (hyper-speed, etc.) independently of the rest of the band. It’s not at the level that the Japanese Bemani games are at, but this is the sort of freedom I’ve come to expect from music games.

A few other points worth mentioning:

• The Guitar Hero 5 guitar is barely improved over the World Tour piece. They say it has a more solid strum bar and an improved touch-strip, but I honestly can’t tell the difference.
• Besides the celebrity guests, the characters are the same old garbage that have been in previous Guitar Hero games. The inclusion of Clive Winston, however, makes up for it.
• Speaking of celebrity guests ‘“ What’s the point? They felt totally out-of-place in World Tour, and they still do here. Besides, Activision could save a lot of money in legal fees by dropping that aspect of the game entirely.
• There’s not much motivation to play online, short of getting a few achievements. While Rock Band 2 has regularly-updated challenges, there’s nothing like that in Guitar Hero 5.
• I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something about the overall Guitar Hero interface just feels tacky and unfinished. I always feel like I’m playing a demo, or beta version of the game. It could just be me, but as an aesthetics whore it just isn’t there for me.
• As always, Guitar Hero is the place to be if you’re looking for solos that will melt the plastic on your guitar, or drum tracks that will make you kick a hole through your floorboards.

Guitar Hero 5 is, feature-wise, the most refined game in the series so far. For their many technical improvements to both the single-player and multi-player branches of the game, I applaud Activision. However, because of the unforgivable song list and not-quite-there interface, as well as a few of the other points I mentioned earlier, I can’t fully recommend buying this game unless you find it on sale (which hasn’t been hard to do in the last month or so ‘“ keep your eyes open).

You should play this game if…

…you absolutely need to keep up with the hardest songs in the Western music game genre, or you throw frequent Guitar Hero or Rock Band parties.

Final Score

A noticeable advancement of the franchise, but still doesn’t have the polish (or musical selection) of its year-old direct competitor.

(What does this score mean?)