With last year's Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s, RedOctane and Activision set themselves up to release more "supplemental" titles using the base Guitar Hero engine. The second entry in what is sure to be a long line of spinoffs, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, focuses tightly on the group, for good or bad.

The base gameplay is identical to last fall's Guitar Hero III. GH:A uses the same rockers, the same graphic style and the same controllers (though a late patch to this title allows use of Rock Band guitars as well). For most of the game, the only difference is a logo slapped here and there and Aerosmith band members substituted in for the default ones.

What has changed, though, is the game's career mode. While players still progress through by completing songs in groups, each set is wrapped with video and animations detailing Aerosmith's rise to fame, and the venues themselves are modeled after significant places in the band's history. GH3's ill-conceived guitar battles are thankfully scaled back, and only one takes place in the course of the career.

The song list is obviously dominated by Aerosmith tunes. Most of the popular ones are here, like "Dream On" and "Walk This Way" (with and without Run DMC), but strangely other high-profile songs like "Crazy" and "Don't Wanna Miss a Thing" are nowhere to be found, though this could perhaps be chalked up to their lack of challenging guitar tracks.

Though occasional other artists are thrown in for variety, an overwhelming majority of the title's 41 songs are from Aerosmith or guitarist Joe Perry. The short song list is hurt by the fact that downloadable content isn't compatible with the title, and there was no hot-swap functionality included to access the larger pool of GHIII songs. Therefore, the main use of Guitar Hero - as a party centerpiece - is crippled, because it only works if everyone at the party likes Aerosmith.

If you're an Aerosmith fan, you probably picked this up on release day, but if you didn't you should. For the rest of the world that dislikes (or merely tolerates) Steven Tyler and company, there's just nothing here to make this worth purchasing over any previous Guitar Hero iteration. It would have been better as an expansion or downloadable song pack, because what really kills it is the isolation from the rest of the series.

For now, I'm going back and playing more Revolution X.

Sep 26, 2008 | 0 comments
Graham Russell