This game is kind of a mess, but a stylish one nonetheless. Also, lord forgive me for replaying these games out of order, and on an emulator no less, but the nostalgia was too strong.

From the moment you boot up the game, things really do feel like they've managed to outdo the mighty GH2 in terms of scale, especially going from the PS2 to the PS3, though I do remember every other version besides PS3 and 360 being severely downgraded in terms of visuals, but the core songlist and modes are complete.

Being the first game in the series developed by Neversoft, they did a shockingly good job considering their lack of experience with music games, this being their first non-Tony Hawk game since 2000 (pretending Gun doesn't exist). Their trademark humour and style carries over well even into a whole new genre, though the note charting definitely takes getting used to coming from the Harmonix games. Sometimes the charting leads to very fun songs, but a lot of the time it's charted so strangely that you can't help but wonder what they were thinking (see the bridge in "Before I Forget") and it can get old fast, especially if you aren't at a skill level where you can comfortably hit almost everything that comes at you. It's probably the game's biggest issue.

The song choices are very solid, and no doubt introduced many people, myself included, to many iconic songs. There's a LOT more songs that are cover versions as opposed to master recordings than I remember in this game, and their quality is mixed but I'd say they're better than the ones you'd find in GH1. The bonus songs are mostly European bands, including songs that aren't sung in English which are always nice to see, and songs that were from more independent labels at the time. The success of this game undoubtedly helped some of these artists blow up, most iconically Dragonforce.

I definitely also need to mention the game's few boss fights. They're very brief but are seriously cool additions to the game and are very memorable. In fact that pretty much applies to the whole career mode, it's not too long and the animated cutscenes between each set of songs are fantastic. That being said, the decision to lock a few of the game's most iconic songs, most criminally Matchbook Romance's "Monsters" (which plays very often throughout the menus to tease you), behind completion of the mostly identical co-op career mode (it does have some new animated cutscenes at least) is genuinely sinful. Use an unlock all songs cheat and don't look back.

The game looks pretty good, and I like how the camera sometimes cuts to the other band members whereas in previous games the camera was basically on your character 100% of the time. When it cuts to the singer, the lipsync is pretty spectacular and it's always nice to see, very rarely your character has lipsync as well for minor parts of the song and it's a really sweet touch. Also worth mentioning the new style of fretboard and overall UI looks great here. Sadly I think the characters you play as are a bit of a downgrade from the last game, and they really get dumbed down and exaggerated.

Overall, it's definitely worth playing but feels like a downgrade from previous games, as to be expected. I admire how it manages to still keep the overwhelming style of the previous games but in an all new way of doing so. Neversoft's tendency to chart very strangely thankfully gets toned down in future games (at least if i remember correctly), but the insane sales also falls off a cliff with it as the whole genre begins to collapse at the end of the decade.