Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock

Underrated beast of a game. Great, fun-charted songs with some challenges to beat, big song selection with little duds, interesting superpower mechanics, 2112, and carries all DLC before it. Fantastic, yet dead as the times came and Activision just milked out the franchise a little too much.

Everyone probably knows what the Guitar Hero series is so there's no point explaining the concept in detail. Armed with your plastic guitar, microphone, and drum peripherals, you and/or your chums can play along to a vast selection of classic rock, modern rock and metal songs.

In terms of presentation, it is very much like Guitar Hero 5. The biggest change is the career mode (renamed 'Quest Mode') which now has a story of the characters transforming into monster looking versions of themselves, claiming the legendary axe (guitar) and awakening the rock demi-god. Each character has a power such as gaining star power on successive notes, extra combo multipliers, or ability to gain extra stars. It does get a bit over-the-top when all powers are activated and you can rack up 40 stars per song and ends up feeling a bit skill-less.

Although some people won't like this idea, it is optional in the Quickplay mode, which is renamed Quickplay+ because of the optional challenges. These challenges are like the ones found in the career of Guitar Hero 5 which can be based on score, alternate strumming, utilising star power, and performing hammer-ons and pull-offs. You can select another players score to target, so can form rivalries with your friends.

The track listing is fantastic, there's a large quantity of songs (around 90) ranging through the decades, and a lot of the modern songs are taken straight from my music collection, so I had an affinity with the game. Because of the variety of songs, there is a nice range of difficulty so there is a challenge for everyone. If you still have the passion for Guitar Hero, then Warriors of Rock is definitely recommended.

The main problem with this game is the story mode. Each character gets his or her own chapter, playing music from one genre. This means that if you don't like metalcore, you will have a terrible time during the metalcore chapter. If you don't like generic popular modern alternative rock, you will have a terrible time during the generic popular modern alternative rock chapter.

Individual song complaints:
1. They used a modern rerecording of Feels Like the First Time that sounds awful.
2. Children of the Grave is physically painful to play on guitar.
3. Charts for songs I was legitimately looking forward to, such as Burn and Call Me the Breeze, were just bad. Either I'm bad at charting songs in my head, or Neversoft never got much better after GH3.

The powers you get in story mode make the more difficult songs trivial, and basically remove all challenge from that mode.

Basically the last hurrah of classic GH, it at least goes out with a bang, with an exciting track list that at least picks the fastest and most fun of the pop acts it commits to, alongside overdue underground metal acts at the back-end. Little additions like open note sustains help tie everything together, but of course, the power-ups in story mode go way overboard in jumping the shark, basically making its own case for the creative dead end the series had become by this point, alongside a story whose premise makes no sense and doesn't even have enough ridiculous pay-off to be anything but lame.

I would also posit that the calibration system simply doesn't work, a big mark against the game even if the timing window is wide enough to nullify a lot of issues that arise from it, but it's a suitably firey conclusion to a franchise that burned itself out in short order.