But it must be stupid, right? So I even drafted in a friend to play it, to ensure I hadn’t lost the plot. After a few three-song setlists in varying sized arenas, something was very right about it all. Even as you start, and a long haired roadie talks you through the basics of the instrument, I thought I was going to laugh. Now look, I’m well aware of how it looked pre-release, and I fully expected to be laughing myself silly at the over-the-top “you are a rock star” nonsense. Freestylegames has made a third one: something that feels cool despite itself. The elephant in the room is that Live is a FMV game, and there’s really only two types of those: firstly, the one that is funny because the developer has taken it all so seriously, and secondly, the one that is funny because the dev knows it’s stupid, and goes with it. From the very get-go, the entire UI has been overhauled, and there’s a clear, distinct division between the core “Live” mode, and GHTV.
You can go the route we’ve seen elsewhere, and play on nostalgia, and make a game wholly for the fans, or you can go away, come up with an entirely new concept, and hope that it works, and is successful.Īnd the latter is exactly what freestylegames has done, because Guitar Hero Live breathes fresh air into a genre that needed it, and it could very well revitalise many people’s dormant love of rocking out with a plastic guitar out, because so many smart decisions are made, and everything about Live feels so fresh and new. Indeed, there’s only so many ways you can go about bringing back something that was so big. Approaching a brand as beloved as Guitar Hero, one that burned as bright as can be, then was extinguished just as quickly thanks to the over-saturation of the genre, cannot be easy.