Guitar Hero: Warriors Of Rock

By Jay Williams

All you metal heads, punks and people who generally want to rock out, get your fret boards ready because Guitar Hero is back and looking better than ever.

Warriors Of Rock sees the franchise return to its rock roots with its heavy metal aesthetic and 90-plus metal/punk set list for players to shred.

Guitar Hero: Warriors Of Rock sends players on an epic rock journey to save rock n' roll from the "Beast", an ancient evil that has defeated the Demigod of Rock who wields the legendary ax-guitar.

So the hero's legendary ax-guitar is lost and set in stone, while the "Beast" lies in wait until the day it awakens again. It's at this point characters from Guitar Hero titles gone by have to unlock their true rock “Warrior” forms to take the Beast down.

Each characters unique ability alters certain aspects of the core gameplay. For instance, one character has a Star Power multiplier that boosts up to six times instead of just double, while another earns a star for maintaining a scoring multiplier above a certain target for a length of time.

Quest Mode centres around eight characters and the ultimate battle against the Beast. To recruit a character, players must perform a number of songs that represent that character's musical genre within a stylistic backdrop. After players earn a minimum number of stars for that character, that character is transformed into a "warrior", boosting their unique power, and is recruited into your band.

When these powers are active, the players can earn well beyond five stars on a score either due to higher scoring opportunities or stars rewarded by the power, with a maximum of 40 stars available for each song. When all “Warrior” powers are active things can get rather intense on screen with lightning bolts and stars flying everywhere.

In the game's Quickplay+ mode, players can play any song in the game or from their downloadable content library. Each song has 13 different achievement to be completed. Twelve are similar to the Challenges introduced in Guitar Hero 5, such as getting a high score, maintain a long note streak, or accumulating an amount of Star Power, and each has 3 levels (gold, platinum, and diamond) that translate to 1 to 3 additional Stars once reached. If the player has unlocked the Warrior character powers in the Quest mode, they can enable these powers to try to get 40 stars on each song for the thirteen challenge.

As players earn stars in this mode, they will advance in rank and gain additional unlockable features such as alternate outfits or guitars and new venue selections.

While game play hasn't been revolutionised, the new visuals and narrative storyline are great additions to the sixth installment in the franchise.

However, on the downside, the set list is a little confusing and doesn't gel at times with the game's heavy metal appearance. The unbalanced difficulty levels and a lack of accessiblilty might also make this Guitar Hero one of the hardest for casual players to get into.

But, in saying that, Guitar Hero: Warriors Of Rock looks sweet and has a pretty solid storyline that should keep players of all types engaged - and if all else fails, hit the Quickplay+ mode for some satisfying fret shredding action with some mates.

Guitar Hero: Warriors Of Rock, good, but not the greatest in the series.

Game: Guitar Hero: Warriors Of Rock
System: Xbox 360
Developer: Neversoft Entertainment
Distributor: Activision

Rating: 70%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)