Guitar Hero Live

The single player campaign is an admirable attempt at blending rockstar fantasy with full-motion video and a slight twist on the established GH gameplay. Even when it doesn't completely work, there is enough meat to it to make the campaign worth playing, with a soundtrack that does well enough despite the decade myopia. However, GHTV as a service, despite some promising features, is undercut by the free-to-play elements and a calibration system that simply doesn't work because it fails to understand how far TVs have come. Throw in unreliable hardware and threadbare vocals and you have a game with very little replay value, a carnal sin for rhythm games.

The beauty of the original Guitar Hero was its simplicity. There were five coloured buttons on your controller, and five coloured rows of notes on your screen. By having each button have a unique position and colour on the screen, it was incredibly easy to learn how to play the game.
The challenge came from more complex guitar parts, and adding more buttons. Adding more buttons meant that you had to first learn to use your pinky, then learn to keep track of where your fretting hand was on the controller. Harmonix continued this trend when they left Activision and applied it to a drum kit for Rock Band.

Guitar Hero World Tour added an open note for the bass parts, which disrupted the flow of the game. It's not immediately obvious what a long purple line running through all five sections actually means. Do you hold every button? No, you hold no buttons. It wasn't a bad idea on its own, but it did muddle the simplicity of the original Guitar Hero. Let's not even start with the "slider" thing.


Guitar Hero Live throws the simplicity completely out the window. The interface is completely unintuitive and requires 100% concentration at all times to process all the information. The original Guitar Hero had such a simple and obvious interface that you were able to sing along to a song, hold a conversation, or just think about your day and still do nearly as well as you would focusing intently.

Guitar Hero Live throws out the five distinct rows of green, red, yellow, blue, and orange for three rows of two buttons.
On-screen, this is translated to a three-lane highway. If you're meant to press the top button, the note will be black and point upward. If you're meant to press the bottom button, the note will be white and point downward. If you're meant to press both, it will be square-shaped, half white and half black. There are also white bars which tell you to press no buttons at all.
And, of course, there will be times when you'll have two notes coming down two different lanes, one pointing up and the other pointing down. Have fun!
There is so much information here that needs to be parsed and noted in such a short time that it ceases to be a fun game, and just becomes frustrating.
The original Guitar Hero made you feel like a rock star. Guitar Hero Live makes you feel like you're doing calculus.


Rock Band 4 is made for people who want to have a fun party experience with their friends.
Rocksmith is made for people who want to learn how to play a real instrument.
Who is Guitar Hero Live made for?