Game of the Week: Guitar Hero: Aerosmith
Bought Guitar Hero: Aerosmith as second hand game a couple of weeks ago. The price was sweet enough not to be able to resist. And the idea of trying out my virtual guitarist chops against Joe Perry wasn’t a bad idea either.
The first single-band game of the series eases gameplay a lot after the rather extreme Guitar Hero 3. As the music is pretty much all seventies/eighties/nineties hard rock, there are no excessively hard songs in the selection (GH3’s Raining Blood has no equivalent in this game).
A lot of the presentation is unchanged from the previous installment, so production values are not really sky-high in this game. And sadly the idea of a “guitar battle” has not been abandoned yet, but fortunately there’s just one guitar-on-guitar bout in the whole game.
It’s not all Aerosmith, all the time. The set list is maybe 70% filled with the band’s songs, the rest consists of hard rock from their contemporaries (and includes a lot of songs that are far enough from the main event and fun to play as a bonus).
Most of the Aerosmith tracks in the game are originals, but the band re-recorded four songs off their first album for the game. There are several curious omissions in the song selection – despite being featured as achievement-names in the game, the likes of I don’t want to miss a thing are absent from it. Walk this way, on the other hand, is featured twice in the game. Once in its original form, the second outing is the joint take with Run DMC.
Achievements-wise this is a nice game, and does not mandate total devotion unlike its predecessor.
The Guitar Hero franchise has been expanding a lot lately. World Tour added drums and a microphone, and the game centering on Metallica is the second band-specific production. Van Halen is the subject of the next third single band-game, to be released around christmas. As a decades-long fan, I’m sure I’ll try out the game on Metallica soon, but unless the game is significantly refreshed, Activision seems to be fighting a losing battle against the Rock Band imperium.
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