What happens when you take a popular music game franchise, focus it primarily on one band, and bring it out in the middle of the summer at full price right before your next full sequel? Guitar Hero: Aerosmith happens, that’s what. While the game plays as solid as any in the series thus far, there’s too little content and too much of a price to keep this from being a must-have title.
Centered around the forming and highlight moments of the band’s career, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith’s main draw is, not surprisingly, the career mode. Playing through the game’s six venues, ranging from Max’s Kansas City to the Rock and Roll Hall and Fame, players can watch documentary-style videos that describe how they got to that particular point in their career.
From there, two songs from bands that either inspired or influenced Aerosmith in some way is played before the band comes out themselves to play two songs on the setlist, followed by an encore.
As you play through the levels and earn cash, you can then go to the game’s vault and purchase more songs that will eventually give you 41 in total. While there’s definitely a good mix of songs with good note charts in the game from both Aerosmith and other artists like Lenny Kravitz, Run DMC, Stone Temple Pilots and Cheap Trick, the song list still feels short overall and focuses too much on the band’s early work, with not enough of their recent material.
The good side of that is that since the game contains a good number of the band’s older songs from their early days up to around the late 80’s, some newer fans of the band will be hearing a lot of these songs for the first time like “Same Old Song and Dance” in Guitar Hero III. Songs like “Rag Doll”, “Love in an Elevator”, and even the more serious “Kings and Queens” are standout track choices from this bunch.
The bad side, as was alluded to earlier, is that many of the band’s songs that are most known in the demographic this game is going for are nowhere to be seen. Oddly enough, they are also the names of certain achievements so it looks like they were at least aware of it. So fans of “Janie’s Got a Gun”, “Crazy”, or “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” among other 90’s songs by the band will be sorely disappointed.
As short as the song list is, there’s no excuse for not having these in the game, which only goes to help the conspiracy theorists out there that songs are being held off intentionally. It certainly doesn’t do anything to help this game’s case either way.
Gameplay wise, there aren’t any major shakeups in either the arrangement of note charts or difficulty. One thing to note, though, is that the tiers in the game’s career mode aren’t arranged by level of difficulty, but by venue. This means that there are indeed some more challenging songs in earlier tiers, as well as some in the later ones. And despite earlier reports from Neversoft that the gameplay was being tightened up from the lenient style of Guitar Hero III, both editions play exactly the same with no changes to be seen.
With Guitar Hero: World Tour coming in less than six month’s time, the timing for this game, in addition to the high price tag compared to its content, is just too much of a hurdle unless you’re a big fan of Aerosmith. The game also makes the mistake of focusing on one band a bit too prematurely, because if Activision decides to continue doing them, this will be the only version in which you can’t play as other members. Unless you have to have every game in the series, pass on this one and wait a few months.
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