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Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock, offers much of what people have come to love in the series, the career mode, quick play, and multiplayer. Instead of focusing on these parts, I’m going to focus on the new items added to this game, the co-op career, battle mode, “legends” of rock, soundtrack, and online mode.

                I’ll just briefly hit on the co-op career. Instead of just co-oping songs like you could in previous titles, you actually go through a bit of a story mode with extra co-op only songs. The main reason I find this mode so important is that it gives people another way to earn money to buy guitars and characters.

                The battle mode is found in both career and multiplayer, and is one of the first major changes a player will notice. Whether it is going against the computer or against an opponent, it starts out just like a face-off from previous games. Instead of getting star power, though, players get battle power-ups. The power-ups can have an effect from cutting a string, where the player has to tap the fret that is sticking up, to having to push the whammy bar to continue playing, to making some notes flash on and off to even a lefty/righty flip.

                This adds a good challenge for players in multiplayer, and a change of pace in career. The only problem is that the difficulty of the computer jumps by leaps and bounds as you get to higher tiers. By the time you attempt the final boss battle on hard, you’ll find it nearly impossible to beat until you put in multiple hours just attempting (and probably failing) the song.

                The battle mode also introduces the legends of rock to the game. The only two legends that actually have a character in the game are Slash and Tom Morello. While Slash is immediately recognized as a legend, unless you know the bands Morello has played for, you might be confused as to why he is in the game (the bands he’s played for are Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave). My only question is where are more of the legends? Where is Hendrix, Santana, or Jimmy Page?

                When you battle these two legends in game, the encore song will be a song they performed in their career. When you beat Morello, you earn “Bulls on Parade” and “Welcome to the Jungle” when you beat Slash. These songs tie into my next point of the soundtrack. I feel that the soundtrack is the best it has been. I really like a lot of the songs on here, and the bonus ones are actually good (at least some of them are). What is noticeable, though, is the fact that many of the songs are from 2000 to current. There’s even a 2007 song or two on here. If this is supposed to be the “legends of rock,” why are so many current songs on here?

                The final added feature is the online mode.  If you have no immediate friends that like to play with or against you, there are always challenges online. I haven’t had to many issues with lag, and most of the games offer a good challenge for players. The only problem on the college campus is that people won’t be able to actually connect to a game due to the servers here.

                Overall, Guitar Hero 3 continues on the success previous titles have had and actually builds on it. I find games that have previous entries before it should always try to add new modes and features to give people a new reason to buy it, instead of just fixing one small feature and calling it a new game (a prime example here is Madden). This game is definitely worth a pick-up if you’re a fan of the series.

Final Score: 8.5 of 10

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