Guitar Hero II Review

The first game proved the toy worked. This one proved it could be a discipline. Three note chords widen the vocabulary, hammer ons and pull offs are charted so that fast passages actually reward economy of motion rather than flailing, and practice mode with adjustable speed is the feature that turned frustrated owners into people who could finish a hard chart. The set list is the other reason this is the one everyone remembers, running from Heart to Kansas to Motorhead without ever feeling like a compilation assembled by a licensing department.

Cooperative play splitting lead and bass or rhythm is where the plastic guitar stopped being a solo bedroom activity. It has clear ceilings. Almost every track is a cover rather than the master recording, and some of those covers are noticeably weaker than the originals they stand in for. The note highway also cannot represent everything a guitar does, so the hardest charts drift from transcription into invention. Still the moment the genre found its final form.