Guitar Hero Live

GameSpewKim Snaith

9/10

I can’t help but love Guitar Hero Live. The more mature, and frankly flawless, visuals of the game coupled with the new controller works much better than I could have anticipated. The fact that everyone is, once again, a complete newbie is refreshing; we all get to enjoy those small victories of completing a song on 100% for the first time again, and relive the satisfying achievement of moving up to the next difficulty level. With a massive catalogue of songs to choose from, and a lot of scope for updates and DLC, we’re not going to be getting bored of Guitar Hero Live any time soon. Rock on!

Worth PlayingTony "OUberLord" Mitera

9/10

Guitar Hero Live introduces two powerful ways to play, including GH Live, a first-person point of view where you are up on stage as the star of the show.

Game RantGame Rant Staff

9/10

That's the genius of Guitar Hero Live. Rather than compete with Rock Band 4, it offers something completely different, and as such the two titles have quite different audiences. Live uses a more modern platform to deliver its content, and whether or not that's a good thing will come down to personal preference.

Gaming NexusJeremy Duff

8.5/10

Yes, things feel a bit different this time around but do yourself a favor and give it a chance. Once you find the groove in Guitar Hero Live, which is the new GHTV mode, you won't look back or think about the way things used to be again. This is the future of guitar-themed video games.

VideogamerSteven Burns

8/10

In theory it sounds terrible, but Guitar Hero: Live's approximation of old-school music TV programming, coupled with the excellent hardware, makes it a winner.

MonsterVineAustin Paul Adamson

I enjoyed the Guitar Hero: TV components a lot more than I thought leading up to the release of GH:L but it isn’t without some pretty major faults. The first downside to this streaming music video system is: there are no options to purchase any additional content for offline play. If you are disconnected from the internet, you will only have access to on disc, GH:Live songs. The multiplayer and scoring isn’t clear; I’d hit 99% of the notes, and still only earn second or third place to players hitting 96% but somehow earning a much higher score. The streaming nature means the song will have to ...

Nintendo World ReportNeal Ronaghan

8/10

Even with the disappointing Live mode, Guitar Hero Live is a refreshing take on controller-based rhythm games. The streaming focus in GHTV works extremely well despite some technical hiccups, and as long Activision keeps rolling out new songs to the library, this is the kind of game I’ll be regularly playing for a long time. This is a fantastic start to a new era of Guitar Hero games.

The most impressive thing to me about Guitar Hero Live is the way the developers have breathed new life into a series that became notorious for doing the same thing over and over again. Guitar Hero Live manages to recapture that essence of playing a beloved instrument, crafting a familiar experience. However, by taking a handful of chances, the series feels different enough to want to invest in it again. Some of the changes are for the better (the guitar), others I am indifferent towards (the visuals) and yet another will take time to see how it fully develops (TV). Hopefully we will continue…

IGNTristan Ogilvie

7.9/10

In many ways my experience with Guitar Hero Live can be summed up by the chorus from Faith No More’s Epic: “You want it all but you can’t have it.” No matter how much currency, real or virtual, you pump in, you’ll never actually own any of its growing library of songs beyond the 42 included on the disc. Yet, this restriction has in no way inhibited the fun I’ve had with it so far. The new guitar makes a tangible improvement to how you experience each and every riff and lick, and GHTV provides an almost irresistible service for enjoying tracks you love while discovering new ones, with absolutel...

Pure XboxKen Barnes

7/10

Guitar Hero Live's microtransactions aren't necessarily as bad as certain sections of the gaming community would have you believe and the new controller presents a fresh new challenge that Guitar Hero veterans will be hungry to take on. The offline GH Live mode is very cool, albeit short-lived, even if the on-disc track selection is lacklustre, but the real meat in the pie is GHTV. It isn't as fully-featured as we'd have expected it to be off the bat, but being able to jump in and spin through a selection from the 200+ tracks (with lots more to come, we're told) for an hour while earning rewar...

Push SquareSam Brooke

7/10

Guitar Hero Live is Activision's answer to Harmonix's Rock Band 4, and seems to be the complete polar opposite to it. While the new Rock Band allows you to use old instruments, Guitar Hero introduces a completely new one; where Rock Band 4 allows you to import old songs, Guitar Hero Live doesn't. The two rhythm games, despite being in the same genre, couldn't be taking more different approaches, then – but how does FreeStyleGames' axe-'em-up square up?

GameSpotScott Butterworth

6/10

Rainbow in the dark.