There’s a certain sadness when it comes to reviewing Guitar Hero 5 this year. See, back in the day when I hadn’t played a Guitar Hero before, myself and Jay strolled to our local shop and picked up a copy of Guitar Hero 2. Fun times were had learning the ropes. Likewise, by the time Guitar Hero 3 rocked up I was becoming more proficient and myself and Jay managed to jam our way through a career pretty emphatically. Good times were had, and the big man even took it upon himself to look at the fourth instalment last year. He was always the master, and I was the talented understudy.

Yet, with 5 now sitting here in my 360 it’s to the tune of only one guitar that I find myself playing. Perhaps tired of the rock and roll lifestyle (but more likely fearing horrible hand cramps), Jay has turned his back on Guitar Hero and gone off to live a life of solitude with strategy and RPG games. With this Syd Barrett kind of catastrophe upon me I had to fend for myself for a good amount of time and then assort a random collection of friends together for a ragtag band session or two, although somewhat fortunately, the game proved decent enough for it all not to matter.

If the above hadn’t already pointed it out to you, we’ve had a veritable avalanche of Guitar Hero and Rock Band games since the big bods realised they meant big cash. With that in mind it was always going to be a difficult task for Neversoft to take what they did with World Tour and make a significant step forward – at the end of the day, you still use the same plastic instruments, you still have to strum/tap/scream in time (or not as the case may be) and you still have a wide selection of tunes to play, with a fair chance that you’re not going to enjoy them all. At a core level there wasn’t much that could be done save for allowing players to start smashing their equipment up at the end of a gig, so it was in the game’s modes that the changes were going to have to be made.

The most obvious changes to the Career mode are that you can now undertake specific challenges within each of the songs to earn extra stars grades. These vary from having to whammy for set amounts of time on the lead guitar, hit a certain amount of kicks on the drums and the like, and a couple of them will rely on your entire band performing if you want to rack up the bonuses. It’s a nice little addition to the usual progression through the tracklisting, and more importantly it encourages you to find extra friends or Xbox Live buddies to partner up with so you can all play your part.

The way in which you progress has been tweaked slightly too, alleviating the old issue of getting stuck in a rut trying to jam through a couple of unlocked songs that you can’t quite manage. New locations unlock quicker and hence you’re always left with at least half a dozen new tunes to test yourself with should you wish, and along the way you meet up with the odd famous person (yes, Kurt Cobain included) who will be unlocked for your own use after you complete their specific songs. It still doesn’t have quite the same enjoyment for me as Rock Band’s multi-song setlist career offering, but enough variety and bonuses have been added to make playing through song-by-song a lot more enjoyable than it used to be.

The tracklist itself is completely subjective of course, although on a personal level I still found myself playing through more songs that I didn’t enjoy so much than ones that I did. Inclusions such as Thin Lizzy, Elliott Smith and Muse’s rather spidery Plug In Baby all went down well in my household, as did riffing through the obscure but brilliant In the Meantime by Spacehog. Less popular moments came when drudging through the mundane Coldplay tune In My Place and Gorillaz’ otherwise excellent Feel Good Inc, which didn’t really seem to fit the bill for lead guitar. In any case, for a small fee (about 10p or so) you can import a few tunes across from World Tour, and with a healthy-looking DLC stream you’ll no doubt be able to bolster the ranks with things a little more suited to your audio pallets.

Obviously it’s all well and good moaning about the track list here and there, but hey – you’re never going to please everyone. Something sure to please more than most, however, is the overhaul the multiplayer side of things has been given, with the most impressive being Party Play. Right from the moment you slot the disc in and fire the game up it will start running through a random set of tunes, of which you can jump into at any stage and using any instrument. Free if the constraints of scoring it’s a lovely, relaxing mode that your mates can join in with (even on the same instrument, if they wish) and is ideal for a bit of a cool down after some hectic band practice.

Alongside being able to play through the career with online chums (each being able to use their own Live Avatar, which is really quite an amusing sight) the game also chucks plenty of other adversarial modes your way, with my favourite being the game’s version of Killer, in which the lowest scoring musician through each section gets the boot until only one remains. Multiplayer fun is aided by the fact that, as in Quickplay, all the songs are unlocked from the start so you can just pick whatever and start rocking away.

You may not notice it so much whilst aforementioned rocking is happening, but the visuals in this instalment have taken a bit of a leaf out of Rock Band’s approach and have gone away from the slightly cartoony, colourful look of Guitar Hero games previous. You’ll now be presented with dulled, more realistic colours and a slight grain filter too, and although in some ways it is a shame to lose the general over-the-top silliness that the series was known for (Clive Winston is still a character, mind \m/), the visual style is pleasant enough. Amongst other bonuses include an excellent creation tool to make whatever kind of musician/freak you wish, as well as a return of the music creation suite that enables you to knock up some homebrew songs.

As an overall package it does more than enough to justify the investment, and is certainly the game to start with if you’re new to all these Guitar Hero shenanigans. You can argue the toss over the track list until the cows come home, but it’s countered by the promise of weekly downloadable tunes, the whole lot of which are backed by the slickest, most enjoyable iteration of the series to date. We’ll look at how it stacks up against the rather narrower focus of Rock Band Beatles later in the week, but rest assured that Activision and crew haven’t dropped the ball. All the more of a shame that Jay seems to have upped and left the series at this point, really; I shall leave the last words to hilariously annoying Leo Sayer in his honour:

“I’m a one-man band, nobody knows or understands. Is there anyone out there who wants to lend me a hand, with my one-man band?”

*sniff* :-(.