Guitar Hero: Metallica [PS3]

But the presentation goes way beyond the way the four guys look and move. You'll find a ton of content here that'll bring you inside the band's inner-circle, including behind-the-scenes footage from the motion capture sessions, fan-shot video from tiny club gigs (the kind of stuff you'll never see in person unless you're incredibly lucky), a gallery with photos and tour notes from years past and song lyrics. Perhaps coolest of all for factoid-obsessed fans however is the inclusion of Metallifacts, VH1 Pop-up Video-inspired sets that allow you to watch the game play a song while notes and info bits pop up on the lower part of the screen. This isn't available for every song, but there's a fair bit of interesting stuff for the numerous selections that you can watch it for. All of this is great all around, and really helps to sell the fact that a lot of time went into ensuring that this isn't just a slapped-together take on World Tour with Metallica songs.

As I mentioned before, the game doesn't stray from the beaten path too much in terms of gameplay mechanics, but there are a couple cool new things related to the drums. The first is the Expert+ setting which essentially turns on every bass drum note. Usually on faster music like this the bass drum notes are scaled back so that you can actually play them with a single pedal, but Expert+ gives you the full deal so that you can attempt to mimic Lars by playing with dual bass pedals. Pre-ordering the game would have netted you a second pedal for free, but you can pick it up separately if you were holding out until now. Of special note is that, at least in the setups we tried, the Guitar Hero bass pedals don't work with Rock Band kits, so even though you can play the game with Rock Band's drums, you won't be able to couple the second bass pedal with the kit.

The other cool mode is a secret (well, not so much anymore) mode called Drum Over where you're able to turn off the required notes for a song and just play whatever you want. The drums are sampled from whatever track you're playing, so if you're using this on "Master of Puppets", the skins will sound like they do on said album. I've been told that this mode was made as a "secret" of sorts so that folks wouldn't automatically think that you would be able to submit a score to online leaderboards, though it seems to me that a quick note saying as much would have sufficed. At any rate, this is a really cool way to play the game and I'm hoping we'll see more of it in the future.

The last bit that I'll mention before I wrap things up is that you might think this would be an incredibly hard game, possibly too much to handle for your skill set, or perhaps a nice challenge from start to finish for you experts out there. That's not exactly the case. While the end does get hard, and you will need some endurance to finish some of the faster and longer tracks ("Master of Puppets" is a great example), I actually didn't have any sort of a problem until I started playing the final tracks. I'm fairly good at the game and always play on Expert, though I'm not the sort that's ever been able to come close to beating "Through the Fire and Flames" from Guitar Hero III. At any rate, the game's difficulty ramps up in a nice fashion, so don't worry about getting left in the cold early on. Newcomers will have a harder time here than with other Guitar Hero titles as there aren't any really simple tracks (like the usual Joan Jett inclusions), but it's far from impossible.

Closing Comments
Guitar Hero: Metallica is a great music game, one that has a track list that almost seems like it was written expressly for the purpose of this title. A lot of care was put into the production to ensure that it is both true to the band and its music, while also offering fans cool insight into the group's on-goings. It certainly doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it's been a while since I've had this much fun with a music game. The only thing keeping me from scoring it higher is the fact that it doesn't support most of the Guitar Hero DLC. Other than that, it's a great experience that Metallica fans should run out and get.

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