#WII U GUITAR HERO LIVE REVIEW SERIES#

Guitar Hero Live does a nice job of keeping the difficulty curve reasonable, which will keep a lot of folks from giving up on it. When you move to advanced or expert difficulties you’ll get more complex note and chord patterns as well as faster scrolling charts to accommodate the extra notes. This wasn’t too intimidating at that difficulty, and it didn’t feel overwhelming for me. When you play on regular difficulty you will start to see shades of how challenging the game can be, with black/white chord combinations, barre chord transitions, as well as a few good hammer-on and pull-off sections depending on the song. When you first start playing it, sure, things seem easy enough, especially on the casual or basic difficult level. It doesn’t sound like much of a change, in fact at first it might seem like they’ve made the game simpler to appeal to a wider audience and that there’s no challenge to be had with the new system. The top three buttons correspond to black notes, the bottom three to white notes. The five colored fret buttons have been replaced by two rows of three buttons. The gameplay has changed significantly since the last time we’ve had our hands on a plastic axe. This brings me to the key difference between Guitar Hero Live and its predecessors.

#WII U GUITAR HERO LIVE REVIEW SERIES#

It isn’t, it’s just not what series vets are used to. Whether you like (or have ever heard of) the bands on the soundtrack is a personal thing, so it’s a bit unfair to say the soundtrack is bad. The game definitely favors the more pop-rock genres, at least as far as the on-disc tracks go. They’re clearly trying to appeal to a younger audience with the inclusion of acts like Eminem, OneRepublic, and Fall Out Boy, but there’s some good classic rock tracks on there as well.

The game features 42 on-disc songs that skew more towards the late 90’s and 2000’s in terms of musical eras. In the past it focused on the hard rock to metal genres, but with this new installment to the series FreeStyle Games have opted to take a much broader approach to the song catalog. Guitar Hero Live is a solid music game with a solid soundtrack. Everything looks very familiar, until you look a little closer.

Wii u guitar hero live review