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After a solid week of back-to-back shows, I've just about got to grips with Guitar Hero Live's new visual vocabulary. It's a three-lane bowling alley where ergonomic icons scroll smoothly into strum bar range, a blizzard of black-and-white plectrums and the odd liquorice allsort hurtling down the familiar endless guitar-neck highway. It's taken some physical graft and a little mental rewiring, but ramping up the difficulty level feels like it has been worth it: there are pleasing nuances to uncover among the challenging punchcard patterns.It also feels appropriate for the subject matter. Notable albums of yesteryear are spruced up using the latest production technology, digitally polished to a sheen to justify being resold to a new generation. For anyone who's wielded a plastic instrument in the past, Guitar Hero Live feels like something similar: a classic inviting you to remaster it.
But if something has been lost in this determined push to make a well-worn mechanic seem new, it's that in previous Guitar Hero games, it felt easier to wing it on the higher difficulty settings. Faced with a labyrinthine solo that looked like a roadie had accidentally tipped a bowl of M&Ms over your highway, you could sometimes let your fingers take over, intuiting the gatling-gun inputs required to bodge your way through.
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