I've had this since release day and have waited to really give it a good chance before reviewing. Overall, its a pretty solid game. ItI've had this since release day and have waited to really give it a good chance before reviewing. Overall, its a pretty solid game. It has a lot of innovations to keep you learning new things on the guitar, such as (realistically) holds that include strums at the same time, and the tap sections to provide a new but optional challenge. Arguably, the drum kit is very good once you've ordered the USB-MIDI adapter so you can fix the sensitivity (its free). Couple issues with the drums themselves - the legs seem near impossible to take apart and the kick pedal's velcro won't stick to some people's carpet. When it does stick, its great, but on the one in my home it doesn't and it just moves around too much if you play heel-up. Couple gripes: they take each drum literally, so you spend a lot of time on the left-hand side of the drum kit while barely using the right. Even if in real life a drummer may have two snare drums, here its always grouped into the red drum on the kit. Next, the drum audio, while more reactive than Rock Band's (the original at least), still isn't as reactive as I would like, and if you mess up mid-way through a fill, the audio for the drums clearly keep going even though you stopped hitting the drums. Speaking of audio, I dont know why they used a live recording for one of Hendrix's songs, because you can hear the other instruments come through other channels. So when you mess up it just gets quieter but you still hear the audio. I ended up swapping out my original guitar that came with the band kit, which lost its downstrum functionality after a few days, with a new one, only to have the new one have a squeaky strum bar. Fortunately, I was able to resolve that issue easily with WD-40, a q-tip, a paper towel, and 7 minutes. The mic works ok, on normal its fairly easy to get right if you try, on hard you start seeing issues on certain songs. For example, some songs seem to have a small amount of lag for when the comet moves (up to half a second), and also the mic simply cannot detect low sounds. If you use a deeper octave and try to hit the lower notes, it just freezes in place. If you switch to a higher octave, it works fine. The real issue is that several songs have the singer use that lower octave, so it ends up being a frustrating experience. Its not like I'm talking about Isaac Hayes low here either. Likewise, the note scales for singing seems to change from song to song. So the middle note for one song seems to be different on another. This isn't so bad except that the high/low gets set to some position that results in going slightly lower changing the comet to a high, and going higher changing it to low, when the comet isn't even near the edge of the highway. People who have used guitar tuners will sympathize with this frustration. Finally, "talky" parts are basically just a matter of making some sort of noise during their presence, which means you could stick a fan up to it and get full points. The music studio is not worth buying this for it. Its certainly impressive at times, but has too many limitations that seem entirely unnecessary. An example is that hammer-ons and pull-offs are automatic to the harmony guitar, and the harmony guitar can only do chords. The lead guitar can do hammer-ons/pull-offs at whatever interval it wants, but it can't do chords at all. Likewise, the bass instrument sounds nothing like bass. It sounds exactly like the MIDI "slap bass" instrument. Younger children may enjoy making their own songs but I can't imagine that many adults appreciating it until the music sounds realistic. Switching back to songs in general, the sound channels, while a huge improvement over guitar hero 3, still sometimes picks out the very faint guitar to do the notes for when there is another guitar dominating volume-wise. Finally, the difficulty isn't tuned very well on the easier settings. I was doing hard drums after about 2 hours despite having little experience with rock band beforehand. Then I found those too easy and repetitive, so I switched to expert, of which both the note chart and the crowd's tolerance for errors become significantly harder. Mainly the big issue is that on lower difficulties there is too much repetition. One more thing, when doing band-play, you only get songs that the band leader has unlocked. But the thing is, its a real pain to have the profiles switch instruments, and for every profile you have signed in the game has to keep "checking hard disk" for each person. Ok, so as negative as that sounds, this is still a very decent game. The song list is very strong and has a good variety, although it suffers from "right artist wrong song" at times, or how some songs like stranglehold are just too long for their own good. Unlike Rock Band's psychedelic eye-sore, Guitar Hero still has those easy to read note runways. The drum kit is a blast to use and significantly more realistic. There is plenty of challenge and a decent song difficulty gradient. Most songs work just fine on the mic, and the freestyle sections are a lot better than those stupid "tambourine" sections of Rock Band. The framerate is better than Rock Band 2. The drums, after tuning, require less effort than Rock Band 2. The kick pedal wont snap in half for no good reason. The band play is more challenging than Rock Band. Everything else pretty much works like you'd hope/expect it to. Finally, the DLC is lacking, but the classic rock pack and "No Rain" by blind melon aren't bad additions. There's also metallica's latest album and new additions seemingly every week, but alas it seems they constantly pull out songs that never really made it big even if its from popular artists. I have yet to play an online game. When I tried it took too long to find a game, after multiple tries I gave up. Honestly, considering there are leaderboards, I dont see the point anyways.… Expand