Guitar Hero: Smash Hits

Rating Teen Genre music Publisher Activision External Links

Since so many music game titles have come out in recent years, a greatest hits game was bound to happen.  Guitar Hero: Smash Hits pulls together some of the favorites from GH1, GH2, GH3, GH:Rocks the 80’s, and GH:Aerosmith and piles them into a standalone game.  All of the tracks have been updated with the original artists instead of the cover bands that were necessary early on before this genre became such a big deal.  In addition, drum and vocal lines are now available for all of the old tracks.

For the most part gameplay is exactly what you would expect if you’ve played any of the Guitar Hero titles.  There’s a fresh coat of paint on everything, but the character creation and other little add-ons are largely in the same style that has been in place since Guitar Hero World Tour.  You earn cash depending on how well you perform and that cash can be used for new instruments, clothes, and any other rock gear you may desire.  One nice feature is that all of the songs are available for play right from the start in quickplay mode.  So you don’t have to spend hours unlocking everything if you just want to have a few friends over and try out some of the tougher songs.

There are multiple difficulty levels available and Smash Hits even incorporates the Expert+ drum line that was introduced in Guitar Hero: Metallica.  You’ll need a second bass pedal and some serious drumming skills to pull it off, but about half the songs in the playlist offer that difficulty level.  Another change I noticed was in the rating system.  In previous Guitar Hero games, your song star rating was based on how you performed in each segment of the song.  I always thought this was tough mostly because I’d always wreck some part along the way and it would make it impossible to get anything better than 3 or 4 stars.  In Smash Hits they seem to have gone to the Rock Band style of star ranking.  It’s mostly based on score and you’ll notice a meter constantly filling as you hit notes and each time you reach the required level a star will fill in.

This is really a tough game to judge for me.  On one hand, they’ve brought back a lot of really good songs and made them available for all instruments.  If you’re somewhat new to Guitar Hero, you may not have even had a chance to play some of them.  Certainly the songs from Rock the 80’s are nice because that was only available on the PS2 originally.  On the flip side, if you have played all along there’s nothing really new here unless you’re dying to be able to sing or drum on the older songs.  The fingerings and some of the newer guitar techniques are there now as well, but it’s not a major change.  It’s one of those things where I feel like most of these songs could have been made into downloadable content and added to World Tour.  There are certainly some questionable songs on the song list and some glaring omissions.  Making everyone pay $60 is kind of rough when you may not really want a lot of these songs.  Especially when I would have paid about as much in downloading the songs I did want.  The upside of making it a download would be expanding the playlist for World Tour similarly to how you are able to incorporate Rock Band 1’s song list into Rock Band 2.  With the release of Smash Hits as a standalone, it makes it a little less fun if I have to switch discs around to go to other songs I like on other GH titles.

Overall, if you’re somewhat new to the Guitar Hero series and missed out on a lot of the earlier titles this is like a new game for you and is probably worthwhile.  No matter what, I’ve always had fun playing both Guitar Hero and Rock Band, so I can’t really complain too much.  It would be nice to see Guitar Hero focus a little more on downloads though rather than spitting out new standalone games every couple of months.  It’s one area where I think Rock Band does a better job.