Guitar Hero Live Reviews
A smartly redesigned controller and addictive song streaming makes Guitar Hero Live a largely enjoyable music game.
Guitar Hero Live rejuvenates a tired franchise from top to bottom, making broad changes to its gameplay and presentation that largely work for the better.
Guitar Hero Live's lavish reboot feels like a solid foundation, but it falls just short of feeling like the finished article just yet.
Tracks are banging, the peripheral's bold and performing feels brilliant, but TV mode is a bust, making you rent songs rather than own them outright.
An exciting new take on the genre hamstrung by a frustrating interaction model for getting and playing the songs you want
Embarrassing acting, questionable songs choices, and unwelcome microtransactions spoil the biggest mechanical improvement to music gaming in years.
It's hard for me to mask my excitement about Guitar Hero Live, because in my opinion, there's nothing more exciting than a developer who's capable of outsmarting an entire genre's fanbase. Guitar Hero Live isn't just well-executed; it's clever and innovative in ways that no one other than FreeStyleGames ever imagined. My fears that Guitar Hero Live would be wringing blood out of the franchise's stone were unfounded; at some point, FreeStyleGames found itself a newer, better stone altogether.
A Guitar Hero game that finally lives up to the name, plus playable MTV. Amazingly immersive experience, excellent new guitar. Music television reborn and made interactive. Short single-player campaign with no hope for more. Singing requires guitar accompaniment.
With a cleverly reinvented guitar and whole music video channel of songs backing it up, Guitar Hero Live is the rhythm game for the people who got bored of rhythm games.
While there's still trepidation due the fact that much of its appeal rests on unproven promises and its currency system is needlessly complicated, the idea of new songs being added on a weekly basis could render Guitar Hero Live into a persistent experience for rhythm and music lovers alike. Time will ultimately tell how Guitar Hero Live shapes up, but it's alluring enough to once again raise your plastic axe to the sky and rejoin the virtual rock god army.
If you own a Wii U and like to rock, Guitar Hero Live is your best bet. Not because it's the only game in town, but because it's actually a wonderfully addictive rhythm title with plenty to offer. With GH TV and a snazzy new controller players will find themselves happily diving head first into the best solo guitar experience since the series' inception. Break out the leather vest and fingerless gloves, Guitar Hero is back.
After seeing what Freestyle Games has done, Rock Band's enormous library, and the promise of making it available across releases feels like a crutch by comparison, tying that franchise to its established model. I'll still hop back to Rock Band to play drums, but right now, Guitar Hero Live is where you'll find me clanking away, waiting for the next time I get to perform Ida Maria's "I Like You So Much Better When You're Naked."
A truly fresh, innovative take on a genre crying out for something new. Freestylegames has utterly succeeded in making Guitar Hero relevant again.
In theory it sounds terrible, but Guitar Hero: Live's approximation of old-school music TV programming, coupled with the excellent hardware, makes it a winner.
FreeStyleGames might have done something smart by redesigning the old Guitar Hero controller, and I like playing with their new version better then my old guitar. But Activision might have done something stupid by requiring consumers to buy new hardware if they want to play.
A spirited attempt to reinvent Guitar Hero and the music game genre, but the freemium approach to additional content has its obvious drawbacks.
Though Guitar Hero Live is rough around the corners and may not convince casual Guitar Hero players to return to their guitar-shredding ways, it sets a new standard in technology for peripherals, presentation, and online connectivity.
The Live in Guitar Hero Live means a lot of things. In one mode, you're pretending to actually rock out in front of a packed arena, and in the other you're constantly competing against the rest of the world online. Your band mates overact sometimes, and you don't always get to pick the song you want to play in GHTV, but there's always a ton of music to play. So much is new, from the stage perspective, to the streaming service, to the updated guitar, that it feels like a worthy revival.
Guitar Hero Live is exactly what the franchise needed after its five-year hiatus, and I'd go as far to say it's what the whole genre needed. Although naysayers will lament the lack of more instruments or complain about the non-permanence of extra songs, for many, Live will become the quintessential party game and is already set to be a permanent fixture in my sitting room.
It takes a lot of effort to rebuild a fallen franchise, but Activision and FreeStyleGames have proven to be more than up for the challenge with Guitar Hero Live, taking a classic series and making it its own.