Monday 22 Jun 2009

The short review is this: If you are a Metallica fan this game is made for you, you will love it and cherish it. If you are not, your capacity for noise will be tested, your patience in the face of songs that never end will be stretched, and your left hand will be very angry with you. Being somewhere in between those extremes – a person that likes approximately 4 Metallica songs – I found it a polished, well packaged Guitar Hero game worthy of a part-time metal fan’s time. But if your favourite songs in the previous games have been the ones by Boston then you’re probably not going to find too much to suit your taste and had better wait for Guitar Hero: East Coast Classics.

The gameplay is not much altered since Guitar Hero: World Tour, so once again you can play a career on your own in guitar, bass, drums or vocals, or you can hook up with a local or remote friend to play in a band together. But, thankfully, the format of the career has been overhauled. It’s not quite at the point where every song is available from the start, but you do unlock songs at a much quicker pace in the new format. This time there are only three really compulsory songs – For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Unforgiven at the beginning to kick off your Metallica experience (The Unforgiven, as expected, is superb), and, in an ironic twist a song called The Thing That Should Not Be, at the end.

For the rest, you can choose songs to play out of a whole bunch that are unlocked at a time. To start with you unlock a batch of six, and only need to get 10 stars or so to unlock the next batch of six. This means playing at least 2 and at most 4 songs. Soon the batches are eight or ten in size and you still only have to play 2 to 4 songs to unlock the next and now have a larger set to choose from. I like this because I would much prefer to play the songs I feel like I want to play before the ones that look like hard work. Unfortunately all the songs in this game feel a little like hard work – hard work for your ears having to listen to the incessant rakkatakka of the guitar, and hard work for your hands which think that Metallica should end their songs long before they do.

The difficulty of the songs is on a par with other Guitar Hero games like Guitar Hero 3 or World Tour, even though you’re playing Metallica, the most metal metal-band in the history of metal bands. Hard is quite hard, and expert is really hard (possibly a little harder than before). Playing “Fight Fire With Fire” on expert will melt your hands. On hard it will just make them a little bit hot. That’s the guitar. The drums are hard. They’re so hard that Neversoft added support for an extra bass pedal and a mode called Expert+ which is Expert plus a little bit more. I don’t aspire to play drums like Lars Ulrich, but if you do you could certainly learn in worse ways than by playing the drums in Guitar Hero: Metallica. Fortunately you can choose what difficulty to play each song on, so if you find a particular song too hard on Expert you can drop to Hard for it and then back to Expert for the next song.

The worst possible thing you could do is try the vocal career. Most Metallica songs have a 2 minute intro, a sequence of about four words repeated a number of times, such as “battery” or “master” or “gimme fuel gimme fire,” followed by a guitar solo approximately 2 minutes long and another set of words repeated a larger amount of times, followed by a guitar riff over and over until the band gets tired and decides to stop. Overall it takes at least six minutes to play the average Metallica song, and of that you will be singing for less than one. There is the odd diamond in the rough for the singer such as Nothing Else Matters, Fade to Black or The Unforgiven, but the vocal career doesn’t offer too many highlights – it’s no wonder Hetfield plays guitar as well as sings and poses or he’d be bored out of his mind on stage.

Metallica’s songs suit the Guitar Hero formula to a T. The guitar is always interesting and the drums are crazy. There is a lot of polish evident in the game –the current members of the band are all motion captured (including Trujillo’s hair braids) and act realistically on stage. You can watch each song that you’ve unlocked in a kind of Pop- up Video where the band plays (in the usual stylized graphics) and some interesting trivia (called Metallifacts) appear that tells you how the song is related to Metallica or something about its history. Some other real-life characters also appear in the game and you can unlock them as characters to play as.

It’s clear that a lot of effort was put into Guitar Hero: Metallica. The gameplay formula is almost identical to World Tour, the only change being the extra difficulty in the drum career. But the choice of Metallica songs is excellent, the other songs are generally enjoyable (apart from Slayer), and features like the behind-the-scenes video clips, live Metallica performances, the real-life venues and the Metallifacts all contribute to the overall Metallica feel and differentiate this game from other Guitar Hero games. The odd “plot” snippets that you unlock as you go to each new venue are out of place and make no sense (kind of like M-TV I guess.) Guitar Hero: Metallica doesn’t move the game forward, but if you like Metallica it will entertain you. Metal-haters stay clear.

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Contributor:	Peter

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