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| Reviewer | Platform | Publisher | Developer | Players |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Andrew Rouse | Xbox 360 | Activision | Neversoft | 1-4 (Local, System Link, Xbox Live) |
| Requirements | Also on... | Buy from Amazon.co.uk | ||
| Xbox Live Gold subscription for online play, 4MB HDD/Memory Unit space | PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Wii | Click here to buy Guitar Hero: Metallica. | ||
This game is Guitar Hero with added Metallica.
I could almost stop there since that's pretty much all there is to it. Guitar Hero: Metallica's mechanics are lifted straight from Guitar Hero: World Tour; up to four people can play simultaneously on guitar, bass, microphone and drums and you have the choice of playing through a band career or just picking songs to play. What GH:M does offer is lots and lots of Metallica. The band's likeness has been transferred excellently into the game and the motion capture done by the band for the game makes a clear difference. When Metallica are playing, they look like a band playing their music rather than actors cycling through a limited set of animations in the uncanny valley; no longer will you have to watch your singer bowing clumsily to your guitarist at the end of every song.
The career mode has changed slightly from GH:WT. First, you must construct your band. Unfortunately the character creator has been done away with so you just have to choose from the Guitar Hero lineup. Next your perfectly constructed band is sidelined in preference of a performance by Metallica. After this, the main story starts as your band is chosen as the support act for Metallica. Unlike GH:WT, GH:M does not have setlists which must be performed in order. Instead you can complete songs in any order, unlocking a new venue after you earn a certain number of stars. This change allows you to skip over songs you don't like so much as well as giving you the option to go back and get better scores on earlier songs rather than completing newly unlocked songs. This comes in very useful later in the game if very fast and heavy music isn't to your tastes.
At each venue you'll have the opportunity to play several Metallica songs (as Metallica) and several songs by other bands (as your band). This deviation from the Guitar Hero formula puts the spotlight firmly on Metallica. Their much better animation and stage activity leaves your carefully chosen avatars looking humbled and ready to return to practising in the garage.
The general gameplay has the same strengths and weaknesses as World Tour; the open string bass notes remain, as do the guitar notes which are held as other notes are strummed and these should provide a new challenge to any expert players who are still used to Guitar Hero III. I still found some of the songs to be extremely repetitive (in one extreme example, the guitar track has three repeating riffs and a solo) and there is still a huge difficulty gap between the solo and the rest of the track in many songs. This is probably GH:M's greatest weakness, if you don't particularly like the song some of the parts aren't varied enough to keep you interested, but the solo is impossibly hard leading to you having to play the song over and over.
The drum patterns range from overly simple to extremely challenging and there's now an Expert+ mode for some songs where two drum pedals must be used, allowing you to reproduce the double bass drum sections of these songs. Singing remains unchanged from GH:WT although I found that Metallica's heavier songs were much harder to sing than most of the songs on the GH:WT track list.
| Overall | It's Guitar Hero, now with Metallica. While you lose the customisability aspects of Guitar Hero: World Tour you gain Metallica's discography and much improved animation. Add an extra point if you love Metallica. | 7/10 |
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