In just four years, the Guitar Hero series has gone from an obscure novelty at E3’s Kentia Hall to a pop culture phenomenon. We saw the series transition into a full band experience with last year’s Guitar Hero World Tour, and now Activision has decided to give players the opportunity to play some of the tracks from the older Guitar Hero games in the new band set up. To facilitate this, they’ve created Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits.

Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits features fifty songs from the first three Guitar Hero games and the Aerosmith spin-off released last year. The songs can now all be played in a band, with a player on drums, vocals and bass. To freshen things up for veterans of the original games, the guitar note tracks have been altered to suit the higher difficulty featured in Guitar Hero’s latest outings.


This isn’t exactly a good thing. The tracklists in the first three Guitar Hero games were built up from songs that were selected purely with their guitar sections in mind, so that they’d be fun to play on a guitar. Some of these songs just aren’t any fun to play on a drum kit or to sing along to on vocals. The song that exemplifies this the most is DragonForce’s Through the Fire and the Flames, the hardest track in the third game, which is 7 minutes long and features a very challenging guitar segment. It’s nearly impossible to accompany on the drums unless you sprout octopus arms, and the vocalist has nothing to do for about half the track. Lyrics clearly aren’t the band’s strongest point, either.

Some of the other tracks on Greatest Hits suit the band setup a little more naturally than others, and therefore aren’t as soul crushingly difficult to play on the drums, microphone or bass. Songs like Nirvana’s Heart-Shaped Box and Queen’s Killer Queen are a lot of fun to play as a full band. However, the guitar note paths on these tracks have been changed significantly by Beenox. Whereas Harmonix created the original paths to blend in better with the music, Beenox’s tracks are more “gamey”, focused on challenging players rather than accompanying the music. They seem to have unbalanced the volume of the instrumental mix on some songs – one can barely hear the guitar on Message in a Bottle, making it seem totally weird.


The new guitar note paths are also much harder than the originals. This might benefit die-hard fans of the early games looking for something new, but they will seem unnecessarily difficult to many players. These new paths are also particularly heavy on hammer-ons and pull-offs, but Beenox hasn’t attempted to improve the system at all. Hammer-ons and pull-offs even appear more frequently on the easy difficulty, where their appearance has previously been quite rare. One would think that Beenox would stick to catering to the key Guitar Hero demographic of more casual gaming fans, but they appear to have crafted Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits with the hardest of the hardcore fans in mind. That said, some of the more notoriously difficult tracks like Raining Blood and the aforementioned Through the Fire and the Flames are made slightly easier thanks to the linked notes that allow for strum-free play in some sections.

Continuing with the inflexibilities of past Guitar Hero games, Greatest Hits doesn’t allow players to share any of the downloadable content or created tracks from other games in the series. One would have thought that Activision might have learnt a thing or two from Rock Band on that front, and allowed players to pull over tracks from World Tour or Metallica into Greatest Hits, but you still can’t.


It’s not all bad though. Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits still features a strong track list, all of which are now master tracks, with the exception of two tracks which are instead based on live performances of their respective bands. Greatest Hits also picks up on the enhancements made to the interface and career mode introduced in the recent Metallica version of the game, meaning you can see your current star performance during a track, and only need to complete a small sample of songs to “beat” the career mode. Some tracks are also just really fun to play in with a couple of friends.

There’s a good selection of tracks in Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits, but not all of them seem like they’re suited for full band play. The instrumental mix also seems to have been messed up on some songs. The compilation is a bit pricey too – full retail price for a set of 50 songs you’ve already played to death on earlier versions of the game. The content in the game seems like a prime candidate for downloadable content, rather than as a full retail release – perhaps in the future, Activision will seek to make the series a little more flexible and share the downloadable content between titles. As it is, Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits is not something that can be easily recommended unless you’re a really dedicated fan of the series.