Guitar Hero III – Review

Both pdk27 and insanemouse picked up Guitar Hero III this weekend. However pdk27 bought the Wii version with the new guitar and insanemouse bought the 360 version without the new guitar. So therefore we are going to do a multi-review of this game. So without futher adeu…

pdk27’s take:

Ever since the day I played Iron Man on Guitar Hero 1, I’ve been a fan of this series. I’ve completed career mode on 1, 2 (PS2/and 360), and 80’s edition. Most of them where great. 80’s Edition almost made me give up on the series for Rock Band (which I still plan to get anyways). However last week I got caught up in the hype and pre-ordered the Wii version of Guitar Hero. So far Guitar Hero 3 has redeemed the series as well as bringing a great 3rd party game to a Nintendo platform (quite unusual as of late).

Since we have a double review going on here I’ll keep this short and sweet. I would rank this guitar hero 1st overall in terms of features (co-op, online play, boss battles) but still second in terms of song selection. In my opinion, Guitar Hero 1 still has the best songs. Since the Wii has no downloadable content, then I can only hope Activision will release a “best of” series for the Wii including the best songs from the previous games.

As far as the guitar goes, I think it’s the best one yet. By using the Wiimote for the wireless device, the Wii version of GH3 has a real advantage as far as immersion goes. The guitar rumbles during your best moments and twanks out of the speaker during you low ones. It’s not a necessary feature but it’s really neat that its there.

Overall I would give the Wii version a 3.5/5. I don’t think it’s as good as the 360 version but it really manages to hold its own.

insanemouse’s take:

Having never played Guitar Hero for any real length of time, I claim Guitar Hero II on Xbox 360 as my first GH game. I really, really enjoyed GH2, though, so picking up GH3 was a sure bet for me. I was a bit apprehensive going into the game, however, because I downloaded the demo on Xbox Live last week and was a bit unimpressed. I can’t really say what my expectations were, though.

As pdk27 stated, I picked up the game only version, since I have two of the Xplorer guitars for the 360…but I would really like to give the new guitar a whirl, as I hear it’s really nice. Oh well. At any rate, the feature set of the game is pretty large with solo and co-op careers, as well as online battles with people. As far as the interface…it’s Guitar Hero, with the addition of pre-composed battles…and that’s about that.

The setlist for the game is a real hit-or-miss with me as I don’t recognize a lot of the song, even some of the newer ones. The ones I do recognize, however, are simply amazing. Original recordings of ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, ‘Even Flow’, and ‘Sabotage’ really sweeten the deal. My main gripe with the game, though, is that co-op and solo careers unlock different songs. I agree with the fact that multiplayer GH is a blast and getting rewarded for playing it is fun, but there are people out there in the world that don’t have people to play with.

I would love to score the game highly, but I simply had more fun with Guitar Hero II, maybe because it was a new experience at the time. I also might be a bit jaded by my experience over the weekend with Rock Band. Either way, I’ll echo pdk27’s score of 3.5/5. It’s good, but Rock Band will simply be better. I am interested to see how Rock Band will handle downloadable content, because we know that GH’s (from GH2 experience) model isn’t exactly enticing to the consumer.