Guitar Hero III rocks! It’s a fun game and the formula that has proven its success since its first iteration remains intact and expanded upon. Before we begin exploring some of the new elements in the game, let’s talk about the overall difficulty. After playing the previous versions of Guitar Hero, I must admit that GHIII is no joke. The game has up the ante on difficulty.

When played on easy it’s awesome and tuned well to ease in new players; however, when moving up the difficulty ladder GH III gets exponentially harder. This iteration of the franchise is by far the hardest version. I’ve spoke to many Guitar Hero veterans and the consensus points to this game being extremely insane to beat on expert or even on hard. Not only is the level difficulty new to this version of GH3 the inclusion of boss battles adds to the insanity.

After a set of songs the game pits you against rock legends such as Tom Morella and Slash. These guys are good and rock legends for a reason (Slash is a jerk by the way). I must admit though there are ways to defeat them…I guess you can say they are victims of their own talent i.e. a game mechanic flaw. Let me explain, the legends compose a song uniquely for the boss battles. The songs are complex hitting from highs to lows, to lows to highs and so forth.

During boss battles the game gives you certain power ups that you use to throw over to your opponent, think Mario Kart with a Guitar…wait just think Mario Kart power ups. The power ups range from things such as string cut, where a string gets cut loose and you have to mash on it to repair, amp overload, where your fret board bounces up and down causing accuracy to fail, difficulty up, self explanatory, and lefty, where you play the chords backwards.