Play well and you enter a world where your bandmates nod in approval and the crowd cheers with positive posters miss a handful of notes and you enter a world where your bandmates shake their heads and the crowd throws red Solo cups at your face. Each stage asks you to complete a short setlist of songs, and while there's no way to fail, how you perform will determine how the crowd and your bandmates react in real-time.Įssentially, your player flips between two realities (yes, realities). Acting as the story mode of sorts, Live mode pits you in the first-person role of a guitarist who is about to head on stage with one of the game's many fictional bands in two fictional music festivals, with the caveat being that these bands are comprised of actual musicians and the music festivals are filled with a live audience.
The other draw for Guitar Hero Live is the sheer technological prowess between the realistic on-stage experience in the eponymous Live mode and the music video streaming in RPG-like Guitar Hero TV mode.
And considering that the challenge brought by the six-button guitar, the inability to view the entire leaderboard for a particular song devalues the experience for score-hunting players who will want to know where they place in the field.
The lack of a practice mode is equally disappointing, making it more needlessly difficult to nail a full combo on a song. Nothing seemed to work apart from doing a bit of guesswork and manually choosing the option that fit best, even if it still felt off for several songs.
Rock Band 4's guitar has a built-in system so that the calibration is simple to synchronize, but I fought with the Guitar Hero Live's calibration system over the course of three hours, toggling on and off the “game calibration” option that's supposed to fix the calibration on the fly numerous times. That said, it's a challenge worth taking if you have the patience and the skill.Īnother problem is the limited calibration system which is difficult to gauge properly. At the same time, it takes about an hour to truly test whether you can get accustomed to the six-button layout, which is longer than many people have time for or have access to without purchasing the game outright in the first place. The buttons are also tightly confined on the upper part of the guitar's neck, so players with thick fingers will feel cramped while those with small hands will need to twist their wrist around to hit frets across the board. The downside is that the learning curve is now incredibly steep and a portion of casual Guitar Hero players will likely decide in the first ten minutes that they would rather spend their time learning something else (some would derisively say a real guitar) or switching over to Rock Band where the gameplay feels much more familiar. And it will take me a few days before my mind can get into the flow and read the notes on the track without thinking. Switching from one-to-one correspondence for each lane on the track to three-to-one correspondence is no joke, and it took me several hours to get comfortable enough in Advanced before cracking Expert. The easier difficulties don't throw out too many notes at a time and give you plenty of resting areas so that you can absorb the next sequence of notes without being overwhelmed, while Expert will throw even veteran Guitar Hero players (like myself) into a frenzy trying to keep up with the steady stream of chords and complicated fingering, not to mention the use of hero power (or star power) and those crazy solos that ask you to glide through both rows of buttons like butter.Īs a challenge, the complexity is a welcome change and Score Heroes will relish being initially perplexed by the six-button layout before mastering the note placements. In fact, the core challenge of Guitar Hero Live is chiefly note recognition and being able to translate combinations of notes quickly into how your hand needs to be shaped to cover the buttons correctly. However, multiple variations of notes can run along the track: black, white, and black/white down each lane, and also an open strum that covers all three lanes. Since there are three lanes of buttons this time around, there are only three lanes on the screen instead of five. The objective of the game is still the same-hit the appropriate notes as they scroll down the screen by holding down the right buttons and strumming at the right time-but the number of possible combinations have increased exponentially. One column is black and the other is white, and which column is closer to you will depend on whether you're right-handed or left-handed. Freestyle Games ultimately decided that the original five-button guitar needed to evolve in both its look and its complexity, upgrading it to a sleek, black and gold six-button guitar that features two columns of three buttons each.