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“Ride the Lightning” with musical icons Metallica and over 20 other rocking acts in an all new Guitar Hero experience — Guitar Hero: Metallica. Enter the world of Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett and Robert Trujillo and experience the intensity and skill of one of the greatest bands of all time. Shred on guitar, rip on drums and wail on the mic to a set list featuring over 45 explosive hits from Metallica’s illustrious career and a wide variety of other legendary artists personally selected by the band, such as Alice In Chains, Foo Fighters and Queen. Fans will be able to rock as Metallica while performing in venues reminiscent of the band’s epic album covers, themes from their music and real world locales.

Genre: Music

Publisher: Activision

Developer: Neversoft Entertainment

Online Play: 8 Versus

Local Play:

March 29, 2009 –
The Guitar Hero franchise seems to be ever rolling, churning out more than one title a year these days. Fortunately for metal fans, this year’s “side project” is Guitar Hero: Metallica, which brings with it a ton of promise and hype. After all, Metallica is the band that has convinced countless souls to pick up a guitar (myself included), and their music seems to be a perfect fit for the formula.

Luckily, the game delivers in many of the ways that we had hoped for. The track list is stellar, the presentation is top-notch, the band is very well represented, and, perhaps most surprising of all, there’s a ton of stuff for fans of the band to check out. While the game isn’t as immense as the franchise’s yearly big update, and while it generally sticks to the same tried and true formula of past releases, there’s just a feeling of care taken with the experience that makes it a must-play for fans of the band and metal in general.

Click the image to watch the video review.The title is a full-band game, just like Guitar Hero World Tour, so guitar, bass, drums and vocals are all part of the mix. Rather than the gig-based progression from World Tour, you’ll find something much closer to the original two titles where it’s a tier-based system, but instead of having to beat each song in a tier to progress, you need only meet a total star requirement. I actually “finished” the game after having only beaten 40% of the songs, so there’s a ton of leeway in allowing you to move on if you get stuck on something. Obviously there are incentives to go back and play everything else in the name of unlockables and so forth (including the band’s instruments), not to mention fun, but it’s unlikely that you’ll get stuck unless you choose a difficulty that’s way over your head.

Though it presents less of a challenge and winds up taking away a little of the reward for beating some of the game’s hardest songs (like Slayer’s “War Ensemble”), it’s nice to know that you won’t get caught up having to repeat the same track over and over to progress. Also, it means that you can almost skip right past the early stuff and quickly get to the big tracks, like “Master of Puppets” and “One”, if you really want to.

Speaking of the tracks, as I mentioned before, the set list here is absolutely killer, not only in terms of song quality but the overall enjoyment level with respect to actually playing them as well. There’s just something about the way that these guys play their stuff that translates really well to a plastic guitar (if that makes sense). Plenty of fast power cords, blistering solos, melodic breaks that don’t bore you to death and just awesome riffs all around. Lars’ drumming also turned out to be incredibly fun, offering up cool bass work with some thundering toms here and there.

As for the song choices, the tracks span the entirety of Metallica’s career, pulling titles like “Seek and Destroy” and “Whiplash” from Kill ‘em All, all the way up to “Broken Beat and Scarred” from Death Magnetic. You’ll find at least a couple tracks from each of the band’s first five original albums (up through the Black album), with a scattering of stuff from the latest four, which is great news for long-time fans. My only complaint in the song selection department is that “Blackened” and “