At various points in your career you will be challenged by a “guitar great” boss (whether or Tom Morello or Slash can be considered guitar heroes is another matter of debate for players). You then must beat the boss in battle mode to continue your career. Unfortunately the tracks penned by the real-life guitarists for these battles seem designed more to exercise your fingers than to make you feel like you’re belting out a monster guitar solo. This minor grip aside, the real problem with these battles is that they are essentially random and the odds are stacked against you. Beating a boss involves getting the right power-ups and deploying them back to back at the very beginning of the song. If you don’t the boss will have plenty of momentum stockpiled that your attacks later in the song won’t have the power to knock him out. So either you win very quickly or you get worn down in a long song that leads to inevitable defeat. It’s good to see that the developers tried to add something extra to the career mode, but they really missed with this.

Guitar Hero III is the third game in the series and you’d think that by now the overall presentation of the game would have been improved. Sure, the guitarist animations and the rocking venues are still great, but when you’re not playing a song you’re still paging back and forth through one static menu after another. I wish that the developers spent half as much time on spicing up the game’s presentation as they did on working in the plethora of advertising that appears in the game.

You have the option of buying Guitar Hero III in a bundle with a brand new wireless guitar controller. The controller features a detachable neck which is a great feature for making the guitar easier to transport and store than prior versions. The fret buttons are also easier to press and the strum bar is noticeably quieter, all but eliminating the familiar of clack of the old guitars. One downside to the new guitar is that it seems to have a different lag than the other guitars, even the previous wire model. Some people who tried the new guitar out during our testing experienced missed notes or notes that did not seem to register and felt more comfortable going back to the old guitars.

PS2 owners may be a bit disappointed to find that theirs is the only version that does not include support for online play or track downloads. However, on the whole Guitar Hero III is a lot of fun to play and has plenty of tracks to keep virtual rock stars busy. Overall you won’t be disappointed with Legends of Rock.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 86%. Guitar Hero II has its faults, but it’s still guitar hero and we do indeed love our Guitar Hero.

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