E3 2015: Hands on with Guitar Hero Live

There was good news for music fans when Rock Band 4 was announced earlier in the year, but the developer had been teasing it for some time though, but when Guitar Hero Live was announced, it came out left field and unlike the other game, is not remaking the same games from years past, in fact if you were unaware of their existence, this game would still be amazing.

Out of the gate the first thing that you need to know is that the guitar has changed, no longer are there brightly coloured buttons adorning the neck, instead they have been replaced by six smaller buttons, in a three by two style, to help create a more connected feeling to playing a real guitar. At first when I heard that they had done this, I was unsure if people would be ok with it, changing up the formula that Guitar Hero itself had created, may not have been the best approach, but after going hands on at E3, I can assure that not only was it the right call, I now worry for the other game that stuck with the old way.

When you are playing, the neck of the guitar will have three different rows, one to match each of the positions of the buttons on the guitar, the black buttons are at the bottom, the white at the top and when you see them in game, you will notice the colours, but a really cool touch is that the indicators are shaped like guitar picks, with the black ones pointing down and the white pointing up, a little touch to help you know where you should have your fingers placed. Of course this is not always the case as there are times when you will need to hit both of them at once.

But for the people who are Guitar Hero regulars, all the old moves like hammer on and off still work, so you can jump into the game knowing your old skills are going to work still. But there is an adjustment, knowing the old tricks won’t help you when you need to press the left black and right white buttons at once, because of the placement of the buttons on the guitar are different to what you are used to, there will be a learning curve you might not be ready for.

But all this is only one part of the experience, the live gig, at first you will start out in small rooms, playing to small crowds, eventually making your way up to larger crowds, you know the kind that has people at the back that look like dots from the stage. The best part about the crowds is they are live, thus the name and they will react to you in real time, in fact the dev who was walking me through the game had me play badly so I could see the crowd turn, I was doing ok, but in order to see the full extent of the wrath, I needed to stop playing for a bit. The crowd reacting to how you perform is amazing and even the band mates get in on the action, helping you get back into the groove with cheers and such.

The second half of the game comes in the form of Guitar Hero TV, a streaming music service that offers you up lots of content, think of it a Netflix but for music. But unlike Netflix, you can play in two different ways, you can select a song to play if you are a premium player or you can jump into the song already playing, which means it will have you dropping into songs towards the end of a song or in the middle. But if you are ok with that, you can really get value from the experience, as long as you have an internet connection.

My time with Guitar Hero Live was not long enough, not by a long shot, I want to learn and master the new guitar and I want to dive more into the streaming service offered by Guitar Hero TV, but I will have to wait until it’s release, but this is one game to get day one for sure.

Luke travelled to E3 to cover it for his own site Maxi-Geek, he was nice enough to write this for us too.