#Guitar hero live xbox one series

Instead, the developers have recorded live footage with real bands playing each song with a live crowd, and strapped a camera to the lead guitarist to simulate a first-person view. There’s also a fundamental shift with the story mode, which no longer displays lifeless uncanny valley avatars strumming along to the song.

#Guitar hero live xbox one series

Again, I’m totally okay with this, as the series started to get stale when it tried to be too much like Rock Band. Technically, vocals add in support for the third player, but Live is definitely focused on the same one or two-person jam session that the original brought to the table in 2005. There is the option to hook up a USB microphone to sing vocals, but they are absolutely ancillary to the experience, and I wouldn’t recommend picking up the game for singing in the slightest. Yep, there’s no drums, no keyboard, no “bass” ensemble - both players play lead guitar. The chief reason why FreeStyleGames was able to seemingly perfect this aspect of the game is because Live is guitar-centric again. It may feel like a step down at first glance, but there’s a lot of depth found in these six buttons. It’s far from a realistic guitar simulator, but I really dug the increased emphasis on chords and fancy finger-work. There’s a major focus on one-finger vertical cords, as well as split cords with multiple combinations, and open strumming cues with no buttons. It’s especially important to note that the former settings only require you to use one row of buttons, which will help you slowly acclimate to the new setup.Īs time went on and I started jacking up the difficulty, the game gets crazy tough. It also helps that Live has five difficulty levels (basic, casual, regular, advanced, and expert), that all ramp up perfectly depending on your skillset. It recreated that unique feeling of picking up a plastic guitar for the first time. While I was rocking it out to expert-level songs in Rock Band 4 immediately after years of retirement, it took me multiple days to get a basic grasp on Guitar Hero Live. Honestly, I loved having to relearn everything I knew. I didn’t realize this until later on, but it’s actually easier for newcomers to pick up since you don’t have to use your pinky finger at all, but tougher for veterans who are used to a 10-year institution of the same old setup. Now, instead of the typical color-coded five button setup, you’ll find two rows of three buttons - one row is white, and the other, black.

The first thing you’ll notice about Guitar Hero Live is that the controller itself has been reworked.

Guitar Hero Live (PS3, PS4, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One ) While Rock Band 4 is content with giving you more of the same, Guitar Hero Live completely reinvents itself, for the better. Meanwhile, Harmonix cleverly used its game as a unified platform, and stuck to providing DLC support. The Hero series was stale, iterating annually (sometimes multiple times in a year), and assisted in the great plastic market crash a few years back. As I’ve said many times in the past, I was a Guitar Hero man all the way up until I first laid eyes on that beautiful keyboard for Rock Band 3.