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"Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock" (Review)

2:32 p.m. · October 7, 2010 · by Andrew Winistorfer

Reviewing each new Guitar Hero sequel feels just like reviewing the last half dozen. Despite press releases and announcements that claim “the game has changed” with each new title, each successive game bears the same problems as the last one. The cluttered interface. The finger-annihilating, tiny-buttoned controllers. The single player mode that lacks any purpose. The fact that this originator still has a long way to go to match the simple, fun heights of Rock Band.

So here we are with Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, the sixth proper GH game, and (depending on what you count) the 11^th overall. And it has all those problems listed above. As the last Guitar Hero game created by Neversoft—the company that has helmed them since 2007-- due to cost concerns, Warriors of Rock isn’t going to help Activision regain the market share it has lost since its first game in 2005. For all the modest improvements made here, this is still a mediocre—at best—game that gets by on the loyalty of Guitar Hero fans more than any real innovation or replay ability.

The main selling point of Warriors of Rock is that it celebrates “rock,” unlike those pussies over at Rock Band or the hip-hop a-holes at DJ Hero. And that’s fine, since it’s fitting that Guitar Hero would cling to antiquated visions of what music is, like the bands—ZZ Top, Rush, Styx, Megadeath, Twisted Sister, Queensryche—that populate its track list. But the main thing establishing that this is a “rock’ game is the hokey story line narrated by Gene Simmons that involves making a super band in order to release the DemiGod of rock from its bondage. If that sounds like the plot of Brutal Legend, it sort of is. A cornball story that could be depicted by van painting does not a great videogame make.

Apart from that, the game features some mild hardware improvements, like slightly different drums and guitars the feature interchangeable body kits. But in a year when Rock Band and other games move towards more realistic controllers with actual strings, the new guitar for Warriors of Rock feels hopelessly fake and toy-like. Having a customizable body isn’t going to change that.

But when it comes down to it, these games are all about the track list, and Warriors of Rock’s might be the weakest yet. There a bunch of late-80s metal songs that outlive their welcome, absolutely horrible live takes (none worse than a version of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” performed by Ozzy and Metallica), and a song by Alter Bridge and Nickelback both. Apart from jams by Interpol (“Slow Hands”), the Hives (“Tick Tick Boom”), the Stones (“Stray Cat Blues”), R.E.M. (“Losing My Religion”) and Phoenix (“Lasso”), the track list is bereft of subtlety. Exactly like the game itself.