Guitar Hero III Review

Despite having the game since I initially got my Xbox 360, I haven't really done a formal review of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, largely due to the fact that the game doesn't have a typical narrative structure with a beginning and an end. It does have a career mode in all four of its difficulty settings, but the career mode in Expert is so hard that I might not ever be able to beat it. Currently, although I'm close to beating career mode on Hard, the last few songs (namely the Slayer and Metallica tracks), are keeping me from doing so. All this said though, I'm now as close to having played the entire game as I've ever been: I've beaten half of the career modes, I've unlocked everything but one or two characters from the store, I've played every song on every difficulty level (or at least attempted the difficult ones on Expert), and I've done the same with all of the available DLC (downloadable content) tracks, of which there are many.

Overall, the game is still really fun, although I've sort of hit a wall: I have gold-starred all songs on Easy, I've gold-starred most songs on Medium, I've five-starred most songs on Hard, and I've completed the majority of songs on Expert (with at least three stars), but beyond this it has been very hard to advance. Ultimately, there's a really steep difficulty curve in this game, and although the only thing that's holding me back right now are the solos (which I am getting better at), it's still enough to cripple my enjoyment of the game now that I've reached my current skill level. That said, I am planning on getting Guitar Hero: World Tour (hopefully for Christmas), and if nothing else, that'll just give me a bunch of new songs. I've heard the difficulty level on that game isn't quite as hard, but I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, as playing on Easy has gotten a little boring at this point.

Anyway, I still love Guitar Hero, but despite being a totally different sort of game from Mass Effect, BioShock, and Dead Space, it just can't compete with those titles as it lacks any kind of story to keep you interested and has also started to run out of gas at higher difficulty levels. Still, it's a really fun way to burn 30 minutes or so a day...