Guitar Hero 5

Hey look — Avatars! Using your digital Dashboard doppelganger on stage in Guitar Hero 5 is just one of several nice surprises we discovered when we spent a day with the franchise’s latest iteration at Neversoft, but it’s easily one of the sweetest.

“We’ve been working on this for a while,” says project director Brian Bright with a smile. “We sent Microsoft screenshots three months ago, and their team didn’t even know we were doing it. Their Avatar team freaked out.” We did, too — seeing bulbous-headed Avatars bringing the rock with realistic, licensed instruments in their toony hands was part silly, part awesome. Either way, the end result elicits a big smile. As you build your band, you can mix and match them with the franchise’s famous characters or create your own rocker. New character models and fresh mo-cap make GH5’s native graphics look dramatically smoother than the Chuck E. Cheese animatronics of Guitar Hero III and Guitar Hero World Tour.

Mixing humans and Avatars is the most visual and obvious representation of Guitar Hero 5’s new spirit: More than any other game in the series, this one’s about playing the way you want to play. The game’s attract mode shows a band on stage playing one of GH5’s 85 songs. Pressing the Yellow button lets you play right then and there — a note highway opens up, you choose your instrument and difficulty, and then you jump into the song in progress.

The note highways just keep popping up on the right side of the screen any time your friends jump into the game; every player has their own menu, and using it doesn’t stop the music, even if it pauses their personal part of it. And anybody can play whatever instrument they want, even if it’s already taken; nobody has to sing. That’s Party Play.

It might not sound like a very dramatic change, but after trying it, we think it has the potential to completely change the dynamic of game nights — from ringing phones to empty beers, everyone can come and go as they please, and any player can immediately veto and skip the current track in the setlist. We swapped between guitar and bass tracks and tried different difficulties without interrupting our drummer’s multiplier streak. Party Play streams up to 125 of the songs on your hard drive, either from your planned playlists or randomly mixing in the disc’s songs with whatever World Tour DLC may be on your hard drive. The beat just goes on and on.

The instant-on, welcoming vibe of Party Play is a warm, fuzzy break from GH’s traditional competitive focus. “Every time we see a kid in the Guinness Book of World Records playing Dragonforce, it’s cool,” says Bright. “We still want to have that element of difficulty and competitiveness — but we don’t necessarily want that element in the face of someone who just wants to have a good time.” For the shredders, there are plenty of multiplayer competitions here for soloists and teams, online and off. Armed with any instrument on any skill level, you can face off in streak competitions, knockout runs, and score races — and mix them up in a custom-made gauntlet called RockFest. The contests we saw felt fair; it’s simply more fun to win with skill than to try to cause your friends to fail.

Eventually we stopped to check out Career mode, which departs from last year’s rigid setlist structure and follows an approach similar to Guitar Hero: Metallica and Guitar Hero: Smash Hits. First, it’s unified — no more single/band career paths. And there’s no huge story: every gig is simply worth stars. If you can pull off a special goal — a point threshold, or a note streak, or some other performance-based milestone — then you get extra stars and an unlockable goodie, such as an outfit or instrument. Stars open new venues, and venues lead you to the career’s conclusion. It’s uncluttered and looks much more enjoyable than World Tour’s...um, world tour.

We’ve been worried that Activision might be burning out Guitar Hero by releasing so many music games in one year, but we came away from Guitar Hero 5 considering an unexpected benefit: Maybe a franchise constantly in motion has less to prove with each annual release. This year, Guitar Hero’s main innovation looks to be more social, simple fun.