Activision is trying to revive the music genre of gaming with Guitar Hero Live. Harmonix is attempting to do the same with Rock Band 4, but Guitar Hero Live is practically a complete reboot. If you are not familiar with music games, they usually involve a music controller and hitting artificial notes. Here is our Review of Guitar Hero Live, as well as Cheat Codes News.
The Learning Curve
As someone who played Guitar Hero III and Rock Band 2, I will have to say that the update to Guitar Hero Live was quite a change. To those that were used to those guitar instruments, I will stress that there is a learning curve.
Fortunately, like most games, it begins with a tutorial as a backstage bearded man tells you how to hit certain frets. The older versions of Guitar Hero had just five frets on the neck of the guitar controller, and it easier levels allowed for the use of just three fingers. If you wanted to go harder, you would get your pinky involved, and for more advanced, where five frets were involved, it was very easy to lose track of where your fingers were.
For Guitar Hero Live, there are six buttons on the neck, but they are in two rows of three. Therefore, it is necessary to hit buttons in the upper row and the lower row, and these are indicated by the direction of the notes that come at you. The note with a guitar pick pointing up is an upper row, and a note with guitar pick pointing down is a lower row. This can get confusing, and I kept getting them mixed up. Worse yet, some chords are played by hitting the upper and lower buttons at the same time, and I don't even want to think about the advanced levels as yet.
However, the difficulty doesn't make me want to quit the game but get better. If I wanted to make my experience simple, I could go to the main menu and turn the difficulty level to the lowest setting. This means that all I have to do when a note comes by is just strum. Yeah, that makes it a little too easy. However, my youngest kid will like it.
The Experience is Worth It
What gives it the Guitar Hero Live name is that you are a guitarist that is playing in front of a crowd. If you are doing badly, you will see the reaction of the crowd, and it will not be good. If you do well, the crowd will be cheering. I give the game points for that alone because it is all about seeing the reaction. I don't even know how the game filmed all of this footage, and it must have been awfully difficult. The result is worth it as Guitar Hero Live makes you feel like a rock star like you were watching the footage from a GoPro camera strapped to your head.
The Online Features
As someone who was more used to playing these music games offline, I tried out some of the GHTV and other features. I discovered that I could play along with a song that wasn't on the tracklist, and I often saw a video for the song rather than playing on stage. I will have to say that some of the video footage mixed with gameplay created almost seizure-inducing experiences. According to a press release, there are over 240 songs out of the box, but you will have to prove that you can play some of them as only a few are available.
Cheat Codes: No News is Bad News
Of course, when I played Guitar Hero and other music games in the past, I wanted to unlock all the songs, so I found cheat codes online. The issue is that I have looked on IGN, which is usually a good source for information like this, and there is nothing. I'm beginning to wonder if there are any cheat codes available. I see a lot of players calling "foul" on that, and hopefully they will become available.
