Guitar Hero 3

Buy it here!

The best thing Guitar Hero 3 has going for it is the new tracks. Pearl Jam, The Who, Rage Against the Machine, and a few others make me reluctant to trade this game in, but I’m still going to.

Here’s the thing, apart from the “Face Off” levels in single player which were sort of fun, the game does nothing new. Oh sure, there’s on-line play now, and I guess they’re making an effort to offer DLC this time but when you consider Rock Band will be doing the same thing + 3 other instruments it’s really hard for me to care about GH3.

I beat the game on medium in about three and a half hours. I don’t think I had to play any track twice. So if you’ve played a Guitar Hero before, you might as well start off on hard mode. It’s also worth noting the songs seem to be given to you in a haphazard fashion. So even within a “level” the difficult seems to bounce all over the map.

Unlockables include videos of The Sex Pistols (because “We lost the masters!”), Slash, and Tom Morello telling you that video games are for kids. Of the three only Tom Morello admits to having played the game before asked to appear in the sequel.

There’re a handful of new characters (including Slash and Tom Morello), a bunch of new guitars, and bonus tracks up the wazoo. However none of this made me feel like I was playing a full game. On the 360 the graphics upgrade was minimal (not that it matters, if you’re playing you’re probably just looking at the dots anyway), the added game play types don’t feel like a big step forward, and nothing feels well planned.

As a comparison GH3 is a better single player experience than Rock Band, but if there’s even one other person to play with, I think you’ll have more fun with Rock Band’s co-op mode.

Skip it: Most people should be okay giving this one a miss.

Rent it: If you were a casual fan of the first two games, go ahead and rent it. Nothing much has changed.

Buy it: True fans of the genre/series only.