Oh praise be, praise be. Guitar Hero looks to be getting a little closer to the game it should have always been. It’s getting a bit of a makeover visually, the guitar is becoming more and more serious and maybe – just maybe – it might be able to stand up to Rock Band in terms of general awesomeness.

Don’t get me wrong, I have always liked Guitar Hero. The problem is after Legends of Rock everything began to go downhill. We started to see some poor design choices (a whole game revolving around Aerosmith? Really?) and there was a general feeling that the series wasn’t going anywhere. Game after game, the same characters remained, the setlists became a little more obscure and overall it felt like everything was stuck in a rut.

Things have come to a head, to me, with the release of Greatest Hits; a game that doesn’t even bother doing anything new, but merely making you pay a lot of money for tracks that could have really been released as pick-and-mix downloadable content.

The biggest problem for Guitar Hero is the advent of Rock Band : it was, if you will, a perfection of the formula. There was a real sense of group participation, it was just as fun to sing as it was to drum and you all felt like you were together. Playing as a band in World Tour was an entirely different story: sharing Star Power (and essentially stealing it from each other) was a big mistake, the singing was broken and overall it felt as each band member was coincidentally playing the same song at the same time on the same stage without any sort of connection as a band going on. Things needed to change!

BAND MOMENT. And a rather gaunt-looking man. Oh dear. The years of endless rocking out have not been kind.

And changed they have, if you take a look at Guitar Hero 5. The setlist boasts The Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, T. Rex and Bob Dylan sitting alongside Coldplay, Gorillaz and Weezer. Any combination of instruments can be used so that nobody’s fighting over who gets to play the drums (provided you have two drumkits available, natch). To make you feel like you’re actually playing in a band there are “Band Moments” which, if everyone nails them, will reward you kindly. There’s even a party-play competitive mode called RockFest thrown in, which pits everyone against everyone else as they play through a song. Nice.

What’s more, the cartoony stylings of games in the past have been dropped in favour of a more down-to-earth Rock Band-style of realism; everyone looks normally proportioned, and there’s not an Axel Steel in sight. Or maybe there is, but he looks like a normal person.

IT'S OKAY GUYS, I THINK I FOUND AXEL STEEL.

What I’m looking forward to most of all about Guitar Hero 5 is not the awesome setlist, or even the long-overdue, grittier, rockier (yes, rockier) graphical redesign. I’m looking forward to the guitar.

The guitar controllers, manufactured by RedOctane as they have been since Guitar Hero, are the one big one-up the GH series has over Rock Band. The Fender controller’s fret buttons suck, quite frankly, and are just a little too clunky for my liking when compared to the protuding, easy-to-locate classic fret buttons on a GH controller. The near-silent strum bar also feels a little salty when compared to the reinforced ‘clickity-clack’ of a World Tour controller.

Phwoaaaaar. PHWOAAAAAAR.

The World Tour controller is by far my favourite controller of the lot, and the one I am best with, yet sometimes when playing it would prove horribly frustrating, especially with that slider bar on the neck, which was prone to simply going off by itself. What’s more, it was almost impossible to use without having to look down at where your fingers were, meaning you couldn’t look at the note chart on the screen and hence couldn’t actually play the song, as logic will tell you.

This time round, RedOctane have taken the World Tour guitar and given it a slick makeover so it looks a little more like a guitar; little by little, year after year, they’ll probably give it strings and eventually just call it a guitar. The body has a red sparkle paintjob and a white pickguard – a nice touch. The slider bar has, crucially, been given a redesign too with fret button-style notches on the top, bottom and middle touch-buttons and coloured markers on the side of the neck so you can glance down and see where your fingers are without utterly destroying your awesome slider solo. It’s also digital now too, so it won’t be as ridiculously sensitive as the World Tour bar. It is, in my eyes, the most perfect controller so far.

So then. Overhauls in the graphical, gameplay, setlist and controller departments. Does Guitar Hero finally have what it takes to be better than Rock Band this year? Or am I wrong, and it’s been better all along? Of course I’m not wrong. But you can try and argue with me anyway. Go on, it’s the internet.

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