Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits
Group shrug.
In-game, the experience is comparable to Activision's previous band titles, with brightly coloured note charts, a familiar group Star Power meter and reasonably readable score widget and multiplier notifiers. Behind the charts, your customisable group thrashes away in typically caricatured fashion at venues based on the eight wonders of the world. Organising your group's connectivity and appearances remains as fiddly and convoluted as ever (if not more so), but those eyeing the game as more than a sing-and-thrash-along jukebox for Friday nights will still find their needs just about met.
You certainly can't accuse Beenox of phoning it in. Opinion is divided around here about how well the note chart updates work, but the decision to open the entire track-list to immediate Quick Play is popular, as is the mixture of other structural updates from Guitar Hero: Metallica alongside the better details from last year's Guitar Hero World Tour.
All the same, it's hard to get excited about Greatest Hits, and unfortunately it proves rather easy to be grumpy about it. With the average song on the Guitar Hero World Tour shop going for GBP 1.59, the 40 quid you pay for this disc isn't a total rip-off, but of course there's no guarantee you will like everything on it, and the inevitable emphasis on guitar classics means it was never going to be the best band game whatever Beenox managed to do with the charts.
Releasing it in downloadable tranches or as individual tracks may have been a horribly unsexy alternative, but it would have been a nice thing to do as well. And if not that, then at least allow people who spend this 40 quid to access the Guitar Hero World Tour store content. Is that another licensing oversight? Either way, it's not possible, and that's not something to be commended.
Since Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits' release last month (our review copy arrived late), Activision's taken a few hits elsewhere for milking the series for extra cash, which would surely be a very rude thing for such a cash-rich company to do. And as much as I would like to tell a different story, poor old Beenox's efforts are damned by daddy. This is a glorified DLC pack on a disc, but it didn't need glorification - it needed the simultaneous release of the track-list on the music store, and store compatibility, as a minimum, if it was ever to engender any goodwill. As it is, and with Guitar Hero 5 and Band Hero on the slate for this year as well, it's hard to argue with the backlash, or recommend that you buy the game.