Guitar Hero: Aerosmith

Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is the latest in the popular Guitar Hero franchise, this time placing legends Aerosmith centre stage, giving you the opportunity to shred all of the Aerosmith hits.

While Guitar Hero: Aerosmith features a whole new song set, the game remains essentially unchanged. From the presentation of the menus to all the same characters from Guitar Hero III, it’s very clear that it has been developed as an expansion for fans of the band.

The career mode, while still working off the same method as previous Guitar Hero titles – play a set, perform the encore, and move on – does make a few minor tweaks. Between every set, a short video consisting of snippets from interviews with the Aerosmith band members is shown, chronicling the journey that Aerosmith has taken as a band. It goes from their early beginnings at Mendon High School to their break up, reunion, and eventual induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The career spans 31 songs, with all but four of these being master recordings.

One other change to the career mode is that you’ll play two songs at the start of each set from bands that have relevance to Aerosmith’s past before the crowd goes into a frenzy chanting for Aerosmith to take the stage. You can then bring Aerosmith on, and you’ll perform two songs as them before the encore at the end of the set. It’s all a bit pretentious - that is, of course, unless you’re very much chanting along with the crowd to bring them out. There is also one boss battle to be had, against guitarist Joe Perry.

In the store you’ll be able to purchase a couple more Aerosmith songs such as "Walk This Way" and "Rats in the Cellar". There are far fewer additional songs you can purchase when compared to the past games, bringing the total track count to 41. Unfortunately there won’t be any downloadable content for the game either.

Motion capture has been done by the band, and while you’re mainly concentrating on the upcoming notes, it’s a nice touch to see Steven Tyler and Joe Perry performing on stage in a similar fashion to what you would expect.

If you are a fan of the band, then you should most definitely Walk This Way. If you’re simply looking for a new Guitar Hero fix, you may wish to rent the game first, or look towards the next downloadable content for Guitar Hero III. Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is a solid game, but it does walk the very narrow line of being too expensive for a game that is shorter and more limited than what you normally expect from a Guitar Hero game.