Guitar Hero: Van Halen Review

Oh, is it time for another Guitar Hero game already? Time really flies when one comes out 2-3 times a year. The crazy thing about Guitar Hero: Van Halen is that Activision had so much faith in the title that they released it free of charge for customers that purchased Guitar Hero 5. This doesn’t send much of a positive message to the Guitar Hero faithful, but it can’t be all bad can it?

Guitar Hero: Van Halen is set up in the same layout and graphic style as Guitar Hero: Metallica, but is much shorter and the songs aren’t nearly as fun to play. I only had a difficult time with two songs, both by Van Halen: Eruption and Spanish Fly. Other than that, the difficulty level is a 4 on a scale of 10. On top of that, the novelty of David Lee Roth dancing around with that goofy smile gets old fast, and there’s no option to not play a Van Halen song without him.

The song selection leaves a lot to be desired. If you are a fan of Van Halen, then you won’t be disappointed with the 25 Van Halen songs, all from the Roth era. There are none from Sammy Hagar’s time as lead singer, and while I find him much more masculine than Roth, he doesn’t have as much skill with the microphone. There are 19 songs by other artists, and to be honest I only found a few to be enjoyable (e.g. “The End Of Heartache” by Killswitch Engage, and “Painkiller” by Judas Priest). These were the only real metal songs I could find, so naturally I had to cling to them.

Guitar Hero: Van Halen is not a bad game, but if you didn’t pick it up when it was free, you should wait until the price goes down from the $40 dollar tag it was “released” with. After all, the free ones were given out. This is Activision’s third single band game (with Guitar Hero: Aerosmith and Metallica released previously) and to me, Guitar Hero: Metallica was the only one worth the asking price with the Expert Plus setting for drums, as well as the Drum Fill mode. Activision needs to stop releasing so many titles, especially ones of low quality, because they are smothering the franchise.