Guitar Hero: Aerosmith for the PS3

Guitar Hero: Metallica, the second game the Guitar Hero franchise to be based around a specific musician is now out. I, being a cheap gamer, can’t afford to get that at the moment, and being a cheap bastard, decided to pick up a new copy of Guitar Hero Aerosmith from Gamestop for $10. That and I like Aerosmith. Now, I had my reservations about Guitar Hero 3, particularly with the game’s learning curve, and how well it handled anything above “Easy” in difficulty. Does the Aerosmith-based spinoff of Guitar Hero 3 address my complaints?

The Premise

The game’s “narrative” basically follows Aerosmith’s career from their first gig playing, literally, a High School Dance all the way to their induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with each venue in the game being taken from one of the actual venues the band played at.

The High Points

All my complaints about the learning curve are fixed. While in Guitar Hero III I was failing out of songs from the first set (which is supposed to be the easiest) on normal, here I didn’t have any problems, and made it almost halfway through the game before I failed out of anything. Additiionally, all of the songs that can be unlocked through career mode can be unlocked through Easy, and there are some additional songs that you can unlock with the money earned through career mode.

The framing documentary sequences also work very well, and while they aren’t as in-depth as an episode of “Behind The Music” or the band’s official documentary, it sets up the next gig, which is really all that’s called for in Career Mode. If you want more there are longer documentary clips that can be unlocked using funds earned in career mode.

The “special appearance” songs – songs by artists other than Aerosmith, fit in nicely, either as bands Aerosmith toured with, influenced Aerosmith, or were influenced by Aerosmith. Honestly, the only band on here that isn’t, that I would describe as being “conspicuous” by their absence is The Yardbirds, and even then unless you know about how they influenced the band, you wouldn’t miss them.

The Bad

One of the high points from Guitar Hero III is no longer present here – to proceed to the next set you must beat every song in the set, you can’t skip a song you’re having problems with and still be able to continue through the set, which is rather disappointing. The fact that everything can be unlocked on Easy alleviates it somewhat, leaving it in the category of “annoyance” rather than anything else.

I do have a new pet peeve though, which may have been applicable to Guitar Hero III, but I didn’t notice it – for all the awesome real guitars you can buy with your career mode cash, and the verying-degrees-of-lame “novelty” guitars that you can also buy, they can’t be shared amongst the various career mode characters. It’s a nit-pick more than anything else, but it annoyed me.

The Ugly

There is no exclusive DLC for this game, and DLC from Guitar Hero III can’t be played in this game, which is rather annoying. This isn’t too much of an issue for me because I paid $10 for the game, which is less than most track packs, but you may want to keep this in mind before shelling out your cash.

The Verdict

In short, this is basically a glorified track pack and should be considered as such when making a purchasing decision. Basically, if you can get a physical track-pack disk for Rock Band for less then what you’d be paying for this, than you’re paying too much. That said, if you can get it for about $25, then I’d say it’s worth the money.

Unless, of course, you’re buying the game with a guitar, than expect to pay more, not that there’s anythign wrong with that – the game comes with the Guitar Hero III guitar, which will be compatible with Guitar Hero: World Tour and Rock Band, for whatever platform you’re on (except for the Wii), which makes for a good way to either get your first guitar, or an extra guitar for your bassist.

“Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.” – From The Phoenix In The Sword

(For the purposes of this review, I played the PS3 version of the game)

Conan is the kind of game that wants to be a fair number of things, but doesn’t necessarily do very well at a lot of them. The game places you in the furry boots of the titular barbarian, and not the one of the films, but of the original novels. The story begins with Conan raiding some distant tomb seeking treasure, and ultimately releasing a great evil that steals his armor. Being as Conan is not one to shrink from perils that he thinks he can handle, goes forth to defeat this evil.

The game is sort of a mix of old-school story and new-school hack & slash and role-playing elements. The game is pretty much a standard brawler. You fight your way through the levels, carving your way through various enemies. As you kill them, you gain experience, and gain new powers ala Ninja Gaiden and most console slash-em-ups since The Lord Of The Rings movie games. Occasionally in a fight (particularly in boss fights) you’ll get a real-time action event that lets you either insta-kill an enemy or do a lot of damage, ala God of War and Shenmue. However, it’s a little old school in terms of the story is pretty much there to justify why you’re going the length and breadth of Conan’s Earth killing enemies, and in terms of organization – The game is divided into a series of (basically) about 5 Acts, each broken up into 2 stages, with the first letting you get acquainted with the stages generic baddies (who are like the last stages generic baddies except they have different color uniforms, block more and may have a shield) and letting you figure out strategies to kill them before beating a Mid-boss who is basically a tougher generic elite baddie. The second stage has you using everything you learned the last stage to make your way to the boss, who (usually) is pretty big, and you beat by figuring the pattern and/or weakness to their attacks (and sometimes they’re incredibly cheap).

The problem is that it isn’t particularly interesting. The weak story does nothing in particular to draw you in, and it highlights the main problem of Conan – with a bad writer he’s boring. As he’s the viewpoint character (and thus the Player Character), the only tension in the game whether or not you as the player will fail. Ron Perlman, who voices Conan in cutscenes, does an admirable job of trying to keep the player’s interest, but the only lines that don’t suck in the game are from the end of Stage 1-1 and are taken almost directly from “Queen of the Black Coast”. Further, there’s only one other named protagonist with lines, Conan’s love interest, A’Kanna, who is voiced by Claudia Black (Farscape, Stargate SG-1, Pitch Black), and anyone who knows Conan (or has even seen the movies) knows that Conan’s love interests generally don’t stick around after the end of the story/film either because Conan moves on or, more likely, they die.

The combat itself tries to keep your interest for most of the game, and kind of does, as you level up abilities, learn new attacks, and get new parries to kill your enemies in more and more spectacularly gruesome ways. The problems is the enemies start blocking more often, become harder to hit, and start outnumbering you, so what was once cutting a gloriously brutal and bloody swath through your enemies becomes more of a slog as you start having to play more and more defensively – and one thing a slash-em-up should never become is a slog.

All in all, I progressively lost interest in the game, as I ran out of things to keep me playing. Yeah, I could unlock harder difficulties, but as I got to the end of the game, it wasn’t that the game was to easy, but because as the enemies got harder I had to spend more time turtling – and that didn’t appeal to me. There are unlockable cheats, but they’re only useful if (god forbid) you decide to play the game again. There are various unlockable in-game achivements, enough that you probably won’t get them all in one play through. However, they’re only in-game, and there’s no sign of trophy support getting patched in, so the only people who will particularly care are you. All the concept art is unlocked before you’ve beaten the game, and there are online leaderboards, but, though I may have over-looked it, I missed the option of the Friend’s leaderboard on the PS3 version. Overall, I cannot find any reason to recommend this game for anything more than a rental, even if you’re a Conan fan.

Score: 5 out of 10.

Buy Conan for the PS3 from Amazon.com*

*Though I can’t for the life of me imagine why.