Guitar Hero Live (2015)

I really enjoy Live's new fret system - two rows of 3 frets (compared to one row of 5 frets in all other guitar rhythm games). This feels better to play in many regards, especially when playing chords. Solos become more difficult, too, having to quickly interpret which row to press. A drawback is it feels off at times, compared to other games where you're used to pressing a fret closer to the base to increase the pitch, sometimes you need to actually move towards the head and shift to a higher-pitched "string." This is more realistic, but less intuitive. It might have worked better if there were more frets, so the switching would happen less often when playing melody

In lieu of a traditional career mode, where songs are organized in groups by difficulty, Live frames it as playing sets at a concert, where songs are linked more by genre than difficulty. Instead of showing your "band," they have videos from the perspective of a guitarist with real performers and crowd, which is kinda neat. I didn't get much out of it, and I wonder if the resources spent could have been better used elsewhere, but the developers had a vision and stuck to it, so good on them.

I like the new DLC system (which isn't technically DLC, but I'll call it that) where it's based on microtransactions instead of song purchasing. To play any of the hundreds of DLC songs on demand, you need to either pay $0.15 or play about 4 songs on their "channels" (which lets you play a random DLC song, think playing Guitar Hero to MTV) to earn a single-use play token. Compare this to e.g. Rock Band 4's system where $2 gets you a song for life. So for $2 get 13 plays in Live or one song in RB4 - it's up to you to decide which is preferable. Remember that you don't need to spend any money if you play on the channels. Live also allows you to buy a 24-hour pass for $6 to get infinite plays. Of course, it would be nice to have the option to purchase songs forever, as you can't actually do that on Live. An issue with the system is that it requires an internet connection to play any DLC song, as they're all streamed.

So why am I down on this game? There's some really poor design decisions which contribute to a frustrating experience. The major one is the HOPO (Hammer-On/Pull-Off) notation. In this game, HOPOs get a blue outline, which is clearly visible. The problem is, phrases that grant Hero Power (Star Power in previous games, Overdrive in Rock Band) also give notes a blue border. Also, when you activate Hero Power, all the notes get a blue border. In addition, the notes that would give you a 50N-note combo get a yellow border, which overrides the blue HOPO border. You can actually (barely) discern a HOPO note if you try, but it's unfeasible to do during play. So often times you have to guess/remember what notes are HOPOs and which require strumming, which is not good. A feature from previous games, double-speed notes, is missing. Finally, when finishing a song in quickplay, the game puts you at the top of the song list, not at the song you just played, which is really dumb.

Playing this on a WiiU, an odd thing to note is that the game seems to run sequestered from the rest of the system - you can't access the home menu from the game (you actually have to press the power button to exit Live), and the guitar controller can't do anything outside of Live (meaning you have to start the game from the WiiU menu with a different controller, which then shuts off as Live starts). I'm not sure if this is the case for the other consoles' editions.

Live has been out for half a year now, and the developers are still releasing new songs, which is nice, but don't seem to be addressing the gameplay issues, which is troubling.