Review: Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock Xbox 360 game

At £75, Guitar Hero 3 is easily the most expensive video game we’ve reviewed at Computeractive.

On the other hand, you get a lot for your money: inside the enormous box you’ll find a standard game disc, but also a special guitar controller. This is wireless, roughly two-thirds as long as a proper guitar, and shaped like a Gibson Les Paul. It has five coloured buttons on the fretboard, a “strum bar” switch where the strings should be and a tremolo bar. The game itself is ludicrously simple.

As each song plays, the game displays a fretboard with colour-coded notes that scroll towards you. As these hit the bottom of the screen, you hold down the corresponding fret button and push the strum bar to play the note. Hit the right notes and you’ll hear the song’s guitar part ring out – but miss them or play the wrong thing, and you’ll hear only the sounds of a guitar in distress and a displeased audience.

There are four difficulty levels for each song ranging from easy, where you need only hit a few single notes using four fret buttons, to expert, where the notes fly thick and fast. How much you’ll enjoy Guitar Hero does to an extent depend on how much you like the songs it includes.

These span the past 40 years, from the Rolling Stones’s Paint it Black through to a 2007 track from Queens of the Stone Age, and encompass classic rock, heavy metal, punk and 1990's alternative rock along the way.

On the other hand, don’t discount the game entirely if some of this doesn’t appeal – we found that even atrocious 1980s power-balladry (Pat Benetar), idiotic metal (Iron Maiden) and tedious generic pop (the Kaiser Chiefs) were made infinitely less annoying when reproduced badly on a plastic guitar. We even caught ourselves grinning like a fool while happily mashing buttons in time to the remarkably daft thrash metal band Slayer.
Of course, the game isn’t perfect. For one, although the disc includes a total of 73 songs, not all are playable in the main game: some must be unlocked by playing in the two-player co-op mode, which would be far better with a second guitar controller. There are also a few special levels where you must “battle” against a legendary guitarist – these aren’t particularly difficult or amusing. Nonetheless, this an almost indecently enjoyable game, and fairly good value even at £75 - especially given that having bought the guitar once you can buy other Guitar Hero games at a far lower cost.