It's been a tough couple of years for the Guitar Hero series. When Harmonix split off to start up the critically lauded Rock Band, Activision and Red Octane were left with a brand name but none of the original line-up. They faced the Napalm Death problem: how do you keep the band together when there's no one left? The answer, of course, was to rope in Neversoft and keep the name going.
With Guitar Hero 3, Neversoft created the most complex, unapproachably difficult plastic-button masher of all time. It was the ultimate extreme for the guitar game genre: a fantastic soundtrack, blister-burningly difficult and packed in with a satisfying but badly made Gibson guitar controller. Through the Fire and Flames will forever be synonymous with plastic fret-board shredding, not just the insane talent of Herman Li.
A year later, Neversoft improved their craft with World Tour, taking the series down the Rock Band path by adding singing and drumming - it was a marked improvement over 3 for difficulty, featured a robust new guitar controller and arguably all but perfected creating a solid and robust drum kit. Unfortunately, it was also a sprawling and hideous mess of a game, with a weak soundtrack, a pointless and badly thought out guitar slider and an unforgivably broken singing system.
Finally, in Guitar Hero 5, it's obvious from the outset that Neversoft are finally comfortable with putting together the bones of a good rhythm action title. From the minute you start up the game and find you can jump into stress-free party play mode on the menu, it's clear that this is the Guitar Hero game Neversoft has always wanted to deliver. Inviting, deep and, for the first time ever, polished.
The first major change is that the game no longer looks like a 2005 PS2 game, after toning down the brash, garish nightmare visuals of World Tour. Gig environments are as imaginative and detailed as ever, fitting in perfectly with the smooth, refined and finally human looking character models and the lovely grain effect that covers everything. It gels together well, neither pushing the boundaries of console power or taste and decency - it doesn't even drop frames like Rock Band has a nasty tendency to do.
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