Guitar Hero: Aerosmith Review

I can't really say that I care all the much for Aerosmith, which makes me very qualified to write this review. The reason I say this is that if you're an Aerosmith fan you're probably already sold on Guitar Hero: Aerosmith and can't wait to pop in the disc and start belting out the tunes. For the rest of us who've never heard of tracks like Uncle Salty, it's a different experience entirely. Is it worth it for Guitar Hero fans to by the game even though may only be familiar with a third of its tracks? The answer is 'probably not'.

The gameplay itself has remained completely untouched in GH: Aerosmith. You still use a guitar controller to tap fret buttons that correspond to the colored notes that come streaming towards you down the screen. It's Guitar Hero, it's fun to play the songs, there needs to be another difficulty level between medium and hard. I won't go into all the gory details, for those read the review of Guitar Hero III because GH: Aerosmith is the same game in terms of gameplay, minus the annoying boss battles.

The career progression has been changed in this version of Guitar Hero III, though. In Guitar Hero III you need to unlock all of the tracks in the game by playing your way through set lists of five songs. Successfully playing all of the tracks in a tier will unlock the next tier, and you proceed in this manner until all of the game's songs have been unlocked and made available for free play. In GH: Aerosmith the tiers are structured a little differently. You play two tracks, neither of which are Aerosmith songs, you then play two Aerosmith songs, another Aerosmith song in the form of an encore, and then it's on to the next tier. Between each tier video plays with the band talking about the next venue in which you'll play and the place it holds in the band's history. All of this would be of great interest to someone who's an Aerosmith fan, but if you're not you may find yourself pushing your way through one unfamiliar track after another just to see what the next couple of non-Aerosmith songs will be.

The songs chosen to go along with all of this Aerosmtih music are an odd mix. First of all because they are a strange collection when taken together on their own, and secondly because the list isn't the kind of music that I'd imagine Aerosmith fans listening to when they aren't listening to Aerosmith. Cheap Trick's Dream Police, The Cult's She Sells Sanctuary, and The Kinks' All Day and All of the Night are just some of the diverse tracks that span decades and genres to the point where they are all more different than alike. The game's music store doesn't help this mix at all because it consists entirely of Aerosmith tracks, and you can't play any of the songs that you downloaded for Guitar Hero III. Part of the fun of Guitar Hero is in the way that it can make music that you don't normally listen to fun to play, but that's something that's missing in GH: Aerosmtih. As I moved from one Aerosmith track to the next, I found myself thinking that I couldn't see myself ever wanting to go back and play them again. Without any cross song access between Guitar Hero III and GH: Aerosmith, it is hard to imagine having the desire to fire up the game simply to play the one or two tracks that I liked in the game.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 69%. Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is strictly for the hardcore Aerosmith fan or the true Guitar Hero collector.