Welcome to the first official article labeled a “review” at the awesomeghost headquarters here. As my final week of my free trial of Gamefly is approaching Guitar Hero: Aerosmith arrived today. Unfortunately, it was quite the disappointment because when I saw the envelope I thought it was going to be Heavenly Sword which I was really excited to play. Along with the fact that I’ll be away from my PS3 for about the next two weeks. But, it was just a bundle of Aerosmith, oh well, take what you can get I guess.
A little history about me and Guitar Hero. I was into Guitar Hero back when the first one was released, I jumped on board and fell in love. The second game, I was there day one at opening. I even bought that one again for the 360. 80’s edition, I got it, was totally let down. GH3 I won it for free, played through it once, maybe co-op once, realized that Activision was ruining the franchise as quickly as possible. Found the amazing Rock Band shortly after 3, and here we are with a free rental of Aerosmith.
Alright, on to the review. The game features basically all Aerosmith (obviously), however, all only encompasses about 30 tracks. There’s about another 10 non-Aerosmith tracks in the game for a total of only about 40 songs. Now, I didn’t buy the game, so I’m not hear to complain about wasting my money, but I saw the prices, and this is NOT a full-fledged game by any means, yet they are charging as if it was.
The menu’s are all new and ‘smithed up, which is cool. However, the characters are all plucked straight out of Guitar Hero 3 (where they were already mediocre). Everything still feels as stiff as it did in 3. The models have no life about them. The Aerosmith models look disgusting. There are some new skins applied to the returning cast, some of them. Graphically though it looks like it would run on the PS2 just fine.
Now, let me take a break to make note that I’m trying really hard not to say, GH is doing this while Rock Band has stepped up their game to this level, why hasn’t GH stepped up? Just wanted to make note of that…
As a kid I listened to a moderate amount of Aerosmith. They were my favorite band, but I had some cd’s in my tiny music collection. Out of this list of 30 songs, I only recognized about 5 of them and the other 25 were way boring. In fact, even some of the ones I recognized were way boring. That’s pretty much the overall impression I got from this game actually, I felt like I was forcing myself to go through it.
There is a lot of stuff to buy at the store, but not really anything worthwhile. The usual new characters, new skins and that junk. You’d have to play through more than just the Expert world tour to get enough money for everything though. On the plus side, beating the Expert tour also unlocks the achievements for Easy, Medium and Hard. It’s about time they figured out if you can beat Expert you don’t want to waste your time on Easy.
The online play is the same as it was in 3. I assume co-op is as well, but I didn’t get to play it. Battles are back, there’s only one that you have to do in the main setlist though luckily.
I guess all in all this game can be summed up as Guitar Hero 3 with lots of Aerosmith songs and where they didn’t put in Aerosmith songs they pretty much just took the songs out. I can pretty much guarantee that unless your an Aerosmith and Guitar Hero fanatic you aren’t going to find anything of use here. If you’re getting some free rentals like I did, check it out, play through the songs to say you did. Really though, these should just be downloadable songs.
