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Review - Guitar Hero: Metallica

Formats: PS3, X360 & Wii
RRP: £39.99
Buy from £29.99
Released: 29 May

If there’s a band that typifies what Guitar Hero is all about it’s Metallica. The chances are that the first time you picked up a tennis racquet and played in front of your bedroom mirror it was to a song by these monsters of rock. Yet Metallica have resisted the chance to sell off all their tracks to the big rhythm music games thus far. Whether they didn’t like the idea of their tunes being murdered by the general gaming population, or they always planned to produce their own special collection, we now have just about every Metallica hit at our finger tips, on our lips and at the end of our drumsticks.

Using World Tour’s full band set-up you can play with mic, guitar, bass and drums but you won’t play through gigs: instead you can unlock new tracks in career mode by simply collecting enough stars from playing songs to make your way through the career mode. This means if you play well enough on the songs you like you can bypass some of the ones you aren’t so keen on and still complete the story of Metallica’s rise to rock god status. On your journey you’ll play at the great locations and on the stages of some of Metallica’s greatest moments. You’ll also get a bunch of hand-picked classics that inspired the band. A few of these, especially Thin Lizzy’s ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’, are as fun to play as the big Metallica hits.

Beyond the quickplay, multiplayer and music studio modes you’d expect, there’s an Expert+ mode for drums, the ability to play with duel bass pedals, and a Drum Over mode where you can play freestyle to any track. There’s also a bunch of unlockable videos pictures and info about the band for the fans. When it comes right down to it, though, Metallica’s music is exactly what Guitar Hero was made for – and beyond the motion-captured band members and clever extras, the songs are just pure fun to play… and nothing else matters.

9/10

Review by Kirsten Kearney