Guitar Hero Metallica is the latest in a series of band-specific GH games and gives Metallica fans a really nice collection. I’ll preface this review by saying that I’m not the biggest Metallica fan, but I tried my best to be objective while playing through the game. While similar to other GH games, GH: Metallica does add some cool new features to the already fun franchise.

I started playing GH: Metallica a couple weeks ago and I’ve grown to respect the game as a legitimate entry in the series and not just a spinoff. Starting off, GH: Metallica looks very similar to other Guitar Hero games. You have your basic modes: Quickplay, Career, and online/local multiplayer. One thing that’s different about GHM is that you’ll immediately be able to play all the songs in the Quickplay mode without ever playing through the Career mode. I thought this was a nice feature cause you can immediately play that favorite Metallica song before spending a lot of time unlocking the song. I messed around in Quickplay for a little while, then dove right into the Career Mode.

The Career Mode is modified from other GH games to really make you feel like you’re one of the band members in Metallica. The stages throughout the career mimic real world stages as well as decorations and pyrotechnics that Metallica is known for in their concerts. The game also features a much cleaner menu system than Guitar Hero World Tour and I found myself liking the design a lot more than previous GH games. The fonts and interface is much improved over World Tour’s unreadable track names and jaggy graphics :/ One thing that worried me at first was that the game would be incredibly hard because most Metallica songs on previous GH games were very hard. This is not the case however. The game does a good job of stepping up the difficulty as in most GH games, so don’t worry about not being able to enjoy the game due to difficulty. While most songs are by Metallica, you do play some songs from other bands such as: Alice in Chains, Foo Fighters, Bob Seger, Queen, and System of a Down. In all, there are over 50 tracks to rock out to in GH: Metallica.

One of the coolest new features was the addition of an extra drum pedal. This was introduced exclusively for GH: Metallica’s Expert+ Drum mode where both drum pedals are used for the songs. There are some tutorials for this as well, and for me, I definitely needed them. The first song I played I didn’t make it through 2% of it :/ But the challenge is definitely part of the fun in GH: Metallica.

The multiplayer in GH: Metallica is basically the same as in World Tour. You can setup band competitions and play with your friends or anyone online.

So to summarize, if you’re a fan of Metallica and already have Guitar Hero 3 or World Tour, there’s no reason not to buy GH: Metallica. It’s got most of their greatest hits and enough variety to make this a pretty good buy. If you don’t like Metallica, well, odds are you won’t like any of the other artists either.