Rock on! Guitar Hero 5 makes its much awaited debut

Photo from 'Amy the Nurse' via Flickr

Today is the day! Guitar Hero 5 is officially available in the US and is better than ever. Guitar Hero 5 picks up where previous, solid Guitar Hero titles left off, adding some new features and improving on the already addicting game play of its predecessors.  Some of the new features include Party Play, Momentum and Perfectionist.

Party Play is geared for the more time pressed gamer, in a sense that a certain player can enter or exit at any point during the song. You can also swap out instruments mid-game and even change the difficulty during the song.

Momentum is a feature available in RockFest mode that automatically adjusts the difficulty based on the player’s performance during the song.  For instance if a player is doing well, the game play will speed up and vice versa, if a player is struggling, the game play will slow down to accommodate.

Perfectionist is a game mode where players are awarded points only on certain parts of the song, and the final score will be calculated based on how each player did on their portion of the track. So don’t screw up your part!

The online play is also growing rapidly, in RockFest online modes, players can compete with 4 players on their own consoles including a variety of combination of multiple guitars, bass, drums and vocals. You can actually match up with up to 8 players for a single song in online play, and why not, the more the merrier!

Graphics wise, Guitar Hero 5 has included a star studded list of playable avatars. Included in the list of playable characters are Carlos Santana, Shirley Manson, Matt Bellamy, Johnny Cash, and most recently announced, Kurt Cobain. Xbox 360 users will actually be able to upload their own fully customizable avatars into the game, how sweet is that?

Guitar Hero 5 has an on-disc assortment of 85 tracks from 83 different artists as well as future downloadable content.  In addition, 152 of the current 158 downloadable songs for Guitar Hero World Tour are forward-compatible with Guitar Hero 5. What more is there to ask for? Go out and get your copy of Guitar Hero 5 and rock out this fall!