The entire thing is seamless, and appears to be hidden behind motion blur as the camera swings hard from one angle to another, and in the moment, it’s like some weird voodoo magic.īut the guitar itself is one of the truly innovative parts.

It’s utterly silly, but it works as a motivational tool, and I quickly upped my game. Jumping up a difficulty and initially struggling, as my viewpoint swang to the moshpit, they started throwing cups (of piss, one presumes) at me. Play badly, and they’ll react accordingly, too. If you perform well then the crowd will cheer you as the camera swings to a close up view of the most loyal fans. The idea is that you are seeing through the guitarist’s eyes on stage. It only gets bigger and better as the setlists go on, and the entire concept somehow works really bloody well. I watched him play it – you can see the results of his first play in this video – and noticed he found it to be cool as well. But it must be stupid, right? So I even drafted in a friend to play it, to ensure I hadn’t lost the plot. After a few three-song setlists in varying sized arenas, something was very right about it all. Even as you start, and a long haired roadie talks you through the basics of the instrument, I thought I was going to laugh. Now look, I’m well aware of how it looked pre-release, and I fully expected to be laughing myself silly at the over-the-top “you are a rock star” nonsense. Freestylegames has made a third one: something that feels cool despite itself.

The elephant in the room is that Live is a FMV game, and there’s really only two types of those: firstly, the one that is funny because the developer has taken it all so seriously, and secondly, the one that is funny because the dev knows it’s stupid, and goes with it. From the very get-go, the entire UI has been overhauled, and there’s a clear, distinct division between the core “Live” mode, and GHTV. You can go the route we’ve seen elsewhere, and play on nostalgia, and make a game wholly for the fans, or you can go away, come up with an entirely new concept, and hope that it works, and is successful.Īnd the latter is exactly what freestylegames has done, because Guitar Hero Live breathes fresh air into a genre that needed it, and it could very well revitalise many people’s dormant love of rocking out with a plastic guitar out, because so many smart decisions are made, and everything about Live feels so fresh and new. Indeed, there’s only so many ways you can go about bringing back something that was so big. Approaching a brand as beloved as Guitar Hero, one that burned as bright as can be, then was extinguished just as quickly thanks to the over-saturation of the genre, cannot be easy.

Guitar hero live songs