816th played so far
Genre: Music
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: Neversoft
Publisher: Activision
To be honest, at this point I feel like I need to get out the plastic instruments about once a year to cover all of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band game. The first Rock Band game, the most recent one I played, happened a bit earlier than that, but as I’ve got three more games like it to go, we’re pushing them a bit closer together.
Not unlike Beatles: Rock Band, Guitar Hero: Metallica is dedicated to the works of one band. I suppose in this case it’s more Metallica and friends, but there is a definite theme here that should suit the Guitar Hero system well.
Our Thoughts
There is one way in which Guitar Hero: Metallica grabbed me straight away. Although I had a quick look at the tutorial, I decided to jump into career mode early on to make sure I could get a good idea of what’s up. The game starts a song almost straight away, forgoing setting up a character, putting in some weird story beats or anything else. It’ll get done later, still feeling a bit more involved than I think it should be, but for now you can just jump in and play. I understand you start by playing For Whom The Bells Tolls and The Unforgiven as Metallica, which works well. Then your cartoon avatar creates his own band and you go through both Metallica and non-Metallica songs. It becomes a pretty standard setup after that, but it’s a far more exciting way to start and hooked me well enough.
After that, the game settles into the same routine as all the other games. You play through songs, advance to unlock more songs as well as money to create different outfits. At higher difficulties, it seems like some specific Metallica changes come in, but I didn’t notice too much. The song choices are good – I think I’ve enjoyed them more as a group than previous games – and song selection is really what brings this games to their best. I guess that’s where it succeeded.
Final Thoughts
I keep wondering whether these games are different enough to deserve all their entries on the list. Still, this is probably one of the better entries, with a focused sound in the songs selected and ones that are set to be quite playable. It’s a worthy entry in the series – more consistent than the numbered ones – which makes sense here.