5 fret buttons, 1 strum bar, and 1 whammy bar make up your guitar, your primary weapon in Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. The object is to hit the correct notes with your guitar as they scroll across the screen. The game features singleplayer and cooperative campaign, various splitscreen battle type modes, and online play. There are 42 songs to be played in the campaign, and many others via bonus and DLC.
Visually, Guitar Hero 3 looks almost the exact same as its predecessor did. Even though in a musical game like this the graphics aren’t the focal point, that doesn’t mean the developers can get away with using the exact same visuals as number 2. The one thing I did think was impressive were the cinematic’s that would follow every time you beat a section of songs. They were pointless, and I didn’t watch most of them because of this, but they were all right looking. But in this game, contrary to Rock Band, there is no character customization. You’re able to change their guitars and you sometimes have two choices of outfits, but these things never compelled me to point out “Look! That’s my guy. Isn’t he tough?”. I never experienced any graphical hiccups but I may have just been lucky because I’ve heard multiple people complain about the framerate while in play.
Because there really isn’t any voice acting or background music, I guess audio will be dedicated to the games soundtrack. The songs of Guitar Hero 3 differ from new and old, popular hit and no-name, and difficulty of play. There from a huge variety of bands including classics from Rolling Stones and Guns N’ Roses, ‘90s gold from Pearl Jam and Weezer, and recent tunes from AFI and Muse. There are many good songs in this game, but there are many more that I have either never heard of, or are just plain bad songs. I’m not going to list these, but if I got one good song per section I would be lucky. And as a chance to redeem itself, the Downloadable Content gives you the opportunity to buy songs that you want to play. But this fails. I kept myself busy with the Halo theme song and some Linkin Park, but those only lasted maybe a couple weeks before I got sick of them. In direct comparison, Guitar Hero miserably fails in DLC due to quality and quantity.
In terms of gameplay, Guitar Hero 3 really does nothing new and like visuals, is pretty much the same as its precursor. There are bosses in this game that definitely add some flavour, but playing through the campaign just gets so repetitive and lack of good songs make it that much harder to do. While playing your favourite songs is nice, there are hardly any additions in this game which makes it seem as if this should have just been an expansion pack.
Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock is a great game and a definite must have for any classic rock fanatic or guitar aficionado. But the repetition and lack of innovation really hurt this game and made it hard for me to take it seriously. The achievements are incredibly hard, while challenging, they turned me off from replayabilty because they were so far out of reach. And the different modes of play barely differ from the singleplayer campaign, leading me to think that maybe this wasn’t worth my one hundred Canadian dollars.
