Guitar Hero II: Wrap Your Head Around the Return of the Shred

I bought Guitar Hero II as a Christmas present for my younger brother in high school, and for the past three days we haven't been able to stop playing! GH2 is without a doubt the most addictive game I've played in years, keeping me up as late as six a.m. for "just one more track." A brilliant gameplay / custom controller system, combined with a great hard rock setlist and loads of progressive unlockables all come together for an amazing experience.

For this game, you hold a miniature guitar controller, shaped like the Gibson SG-1 of AC/DC fame. You press fret buttons with one hand, while strumming a switch on the body with the other. The controller looks great and is completely responsive. You can play the game sitting down if you want, but most of the time you want to stand so you can rock out in style.

You choose a guitarist character - there are a variety representing various periods and styles of rock, and you choose the guitar that character plays on the screen. After that, you pick a venue and a song from your setlist. The performance begins, and you try to match the notes that flow down the screen in a way similar to Dance Dance Revolution / bemani style games. As you play, your rocker onscreen plays with you and performs distinctive moves for the crowd. The environments range from a High School Battle of the Bands to various clubs, the Vans Warped Tour, and Stonehenge. All of the environments respond to your success or failure with a variety of animations, similar to Parappa the Rapper. While the gameplay seems simplistic, it quickly becomes challenging on the higher difficulty levels, where fast and complicated solos and chord progressions have you flying across the fretboard.

While the difficulty curve is steeper than the original Guitar Hero, the gameplay has been tweaked and a Practice Mode has been added, which allows you to play any part of a song repeatedly in slow motion until you discover the best way for your fingers to tackle a particularly tricky part.

Loads of unlockables can be bought with the money you make from your performances, including a wide variety of guitars, paint jobs, characters, songs - even some development videos that introduce you to the dev team and show how they recorded in the studio. Eight special guitars are made available for purchase only when you've beaten the game on each of four difficulty levels, and again when you've beaten a difficulty level with 5-star rating for each performance. So far I have unlocked the Viking guitar, the Fish guitar, the Misfits-style Coffin guitar, and the USA-shaped guitar, and I've been playing for about three days straight, so there's still a ways to go.

Guitar Hero II is a terrific achievement and I can't wait to see what extras the upcoming XBOX360 version, as well as next year's projected Guitar Hero 3, may bring.

Highest recommendation.