Guitar Hero Metallica is the latest iteration in the popular Guitar Hero series. As the title suggests this game is a tribute to the band Metallica and contains some of their most popular music along with twenty guest acts. Much like with Guitar Hero World Tour you can also create your own rocker as well as your own music in this title as well. There are however a couple of new additions to this particular. The biggest one would have to be the addition of a kick pedal. There is now a Expert + level that will support the two kick pedals and will really test just how good you really are as a drummer.

Activision went all out with this game as they tried to give gamers the authentic Metallica experience. Each member of Metallica performed their own motion capture which greatly helped in bringing the authenticity to the game. The new expert + level will allow you to play like Lars with double bass pedal action. If you are a Metallica fan there are also a whole bunch of extras on here such as concert footage, behind-the-scenes video, lyrics and more. In addition to all of that Guitar Hero Metallica will support the Metallica “Death Magnetic” full album downloadable content from Guitar Hero World Tour. It should be noted, however, that this is the only downloadable content that is compatible. If you downloaded anything else from Guitar Hero World Tour you won’t be able to play it on this title. Guest acts such as Alice in Chains, Judas Priest, Motorhead and System of a Down also help to complete the package as you go through the career modes. This game has the standard modes such as Quickplay, Career, Head to Head and Xbox Live. New HUD features have also been added to this game allowing you to keep track of your star performance as you are playing the song. In Band mode you also now have individual Rock meters so you can easily tell who is rockin and who is a poser.

The career is handled very nicely and ditches the World Tour formula for the more classic feel. Now instead of having to play an entire set all at once like you had to do on World Tour you can simply play as many songs as you want, whether that be one or ten. This is a great decision and should help out people that are limited on time and only have a few minutes to play. When you first start your career you are immediately thrust into the limelight as Metallica and then after playing two songs you create your own band and basically become “Metallica Jr”. As you progress through your career you will unlock the previously mentioned extras such as lyrics and behind-the-scenes footage. You can also link this game to your community profile on the guitar hero website where you can keep track of your progress as it relates to leaderboards and things of that nature.

As far as how the game plays, this is a Guitar Hero game and there shouldn’t be many surprises. The instruments from previous iterations will work perfectly fine and the core game mechanics are the same. They did, however, add a new “Drum Over” mode. In this mode you will essentially be able to play any drum pattern over any song without getting penalized. To take advantage of this mode you have to enable the cheat. To do that you have to go into the cheats menu and input the following combination: Red, Red, Red, Blue, Blue, Green, Green, Yellow. If you aren’t familiar with how Guitar Hero works there are tutorials for the guitar/bass, drums and vocals so you should be up and running in no time. The difficulty seems to ramp up nicely in this game, however, people who have never played a Guitar Hero game might have a difficult time as there really aren’t any “training” songs that are really easy like there was in previous iterations of the series.

Overall Guitar Hero Metallica is a fun game. If you are a fan of Metallica you should definitely pick it up as this game is total fan service. Even if you aren’t a fan of Metallica you should give this game a try. It has a nice level of polish to it and is a lot better than previous titles such as Guitar Hero Aerosmith.

Score: 8/10

Originally posted on Totally Gaming Network