‘Guitar Hero: Smash Hits’ difficult, but fun

• By MILES THORPE
• 2theadvocate.com staff
• Published: Jul 16, 2009

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“Guitar Hero: Smash Hits” brings back 48 master recordings from previous “Guitar Hero” games, but with the added ability to play all of them in full band mode. While the die hard fans of the franchise might view this as money wasted on purchasing the same songs twice, those gamers who are new to the franchise will love this game.

Featuring tracks from “Guitar Hero,” “Guitar Hero II,” “Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s” and “Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock,” the song list is fairly impressive this time out. “Them Bones” by Alice in Chains, “Bark at the Moon” by Ozzy Osbourne, and “Cult of Personality” by Living Colour are some of the tracks that are included.

The gameplay is still the same, but new venues and costumes are available. The new venues look good. They range from a tropical Amazon stage to rocking out in the polar ice caps. The Grand Canyon and The Sewers are two of my new favorite venues. Each of the new venues also has a costume set that is themed to that venue that you can unlock.

Once you have unlocked all of the venues you must unlock the Artifact. The Artifact is, in fact, the most brutal of all the “Guitar Hero” songs you can play -- DragonForce’s “Through the Fire and Flames.”

This brings up one of the aspects of this particular release that I didn’t like -- the difficulty of the songs. While it is understandable that these are some of the best songs from the previous titles, they are all noticeably harder to play even on Medium Difficulty than previous “Guitar Hero” games. Having just come off of playing “Guitar Hero: World Tour” and “Guitar Hero: Metallica,” the songs on “Smash Hits” are twice as hard on the same difficulty. This causes some frustration for those players who could play on Medium before, but now must bump it down to Easy just to get through the songs.

Overall “Guitar Hero: Smash Hits” is a great song bundle for those players wanting to get the whole band into playing songs that were not previously band-friendly.