Gaming & Culture —

Guitar Hero Live review: This is how to make rhythm games relevant again

Live-action gigs are great, but the GHTV music channel will keep you hooked.

The future of DLC is MTV

Unfortunately for Freestyle Games and all the work it's put into developing Live, I don't think players are going to spend all that long taking to the virtual stage: Guitar Hero TV (GHTV) is just far more interesting. Rather than offer DLC song downloads like Rock Band 4, GHTV effectively gives players unlimited access to a whole bunch of different tracks for free. Freestyle's solution to delivering content is essentially a streaming version of MTV, or rather MTV in the '80s, before it decided to shovel reality TV down everyone's throats and it actually played music.

GHTV is a pair of music video channels, GHTV1 and GHTV2, playing shows themed around genres like pop, rock, and metal that are programmed by Freestyle. Players will be able to jump into GHTV, tune into their favourite show, and then start playing along to the music and its accompanying video. The programming is diverse, even at launch, with a huge range of tracks divided up into different shows. While I did see the same track in two adjacent shows a couple of times, it didn't happen often enough to render them repetitive. You can jump in and out of a song as often as you like, with the note highway appearing and disappearing with a flick of the strum bar.

GHTV is, in short, insanely compelling. Despite the proliferation of on-demand TV and music streaming, the fact that things like curated playlists, radio, and recommended content exist is because we humans are all inherently indecisive. With GHTV, you simply pick one of the two channels, and it handles the rest. Automatic leaderboards appear at the end of each song, ranking players against friends or other top players, while rewards such as customised note highways and new types of star power—including a bomb that can be used to blow up a particularly tricky section, or another that decreases the difficulty—are earned by completing certain challenges.

I'll admit, I'm a sucker for this stuff, and as soon as I saw another player overtake my high score, I had to go play the song again in order to beat it. Custom note highways, and player icons, and all the other guff that comes with levelling up is present and correct, and does its job admirably in pushing you to keep playing and beating those high scores. Unfortunately, that's not as easy to do as in games past. The tradeoff for being able to jam along with a huge selection of tracks for free (be sure to check out the metal shows, which include the wonders of Ratt and Judas Priest) is that you can't purchase a track for unlimited access any more.

Instead, you have to use a "play" coupon, which gives you instant access to any of the tracks currently being played on the GHTV shows. You get those by either playing through songs a lot and earning credits, or by purchasing hero cash with real-world cash. Currently, it costs 1,800 credits or 135 hero cash for 3 plays, or 6,000 credits or 450 hero cash for 10 plays. At the top end, you can trade 60,000 credits or 4,500 hero cash for 100 plays. You can buy 900 hero cash for £2.49, 3,300 hero cash for £7.99 ($10), or 6,900 hero cash for £15.99 ($20).

Confused yet? Fortunately, if you're not interested in handing over a penny more than what you paid for the game (to be clear: all the Live offline content can be played as much you like), you don't have to worry about the currency conversions too much. After reaching level 11 in GHTV, which took around five hours of play, I'd already amassed a healthy amount of play coupons to spend on tracks.

I've no doubt that some players will be put off by this. Those that want to practice a track over and over in order to master it will suffer—though there is an option to purchase a one-off party pass that unlocks all content for 24 hours. Essentially, GHTV is a freemium game mode, albeit one that's far fairer than most. Given the way the industry is moving, I don't lament Activison or Freestyle Games for that. The vast majority of players are unlikely to be affected, or compelled to spend money on hero cash to unlock content, whether that be songs or player customisations. Credits trickle in at a healthy rate when you play, and recommendations for songs you might like are gently pitched.

If anything, it's surprising that aren't ads of some sort playing through the interstitials between shows, with them instead being filled with some painfully cool animations of smashing TVs and abstract colours and shapes. Activision says there aren't any plans for advertising at the moment, but I can imagine that advertisers, much like the bands whose videos appear in the game, would jump at the chance to be in GHTV. I hope that doesn't happen, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did.

Regardless, don't be put off by the microtransactions: they're not that bad. The party pass is a reasonable substitute for individual purchases, and I love that you can just leave GHTV on in the background at a party, much like MTV back in the day, jumping into a song with friends after pounding a few hard brews. You can't assemble a full band like you can in Rock Band—you're limited to two-player with another person singing along with a microphone. But let's face it: breaking out the Rock Band drum kit was always a pain the bum to set up, especially for those of us living in poky London flats.

What's really impressed me about Guitar Hero Live, though, is that Activision could have easily just churned out the same game it did five years ago, playing to the nostalgia attached to the clicking strum bars and drunken antics of an all-night Guitar Hero bender, and raking in a few quick bucks in the process. But it didn't. Guitar Hero Live is a bold and ambitious attempt to reinvent a genre that died because it grew stale. And you know what? It's absolutely succeeded.

The Good

  • New guitar is easier for newbies to pick up and trickier for veterans to master
  • Sharp presentation throughout
  • Live-action footage makes the 3D avatars of old look seriously dated
  • Guitar Hero TV's endless stream of tracks and high scores is wonderfully compelling
  • Being reminded just how great (and how awful) music videos are
  • Microtransactions are relatively gentle...

The Bad

  • ...but not everyone is going to be happy about not being able to purchase a track
  • Seriously, why do I have go through the inane process of unlocking stuff again?

The Ugly

  • There's lots of content now, but how long will Activision keep GHTV going?

Verdict: With a cleverly reinvented guitar and whole music video channel of songs backing it up, Guitar Hero Live is the rhythm game for the people who got bored of rhythm games.

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Channel Ars Technica