I experienced some serious deja vu this weekend as I played through the new Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. Like last year's Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the '80s, it's both shorter and easier than the game it was based on, but still full price. And so, like Rocks the 80s, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith isn't bad, but leaves you somewhat empty, feeling like it's about ten songs short of giving you your money's worth.
Perhaps realizing there are only a finite number of decades to build expansions around, the Guitar Hero camp (Activision, Red Octane and developer Neversoft) this time decided to focus on a single artist, in this case, Aerosmith. Granted, the Boston rockers probably weren't at the top of the wish list for many Guitar Hero fans, but they're a solid choice, with 30+ years of material to mine.
GH:A is structured similarly to previous Guitar Hero games: There are six tiers of songs, each starting with two non-Aerosmith artists, then three Aerosmith tunes. In theory, the songs are supposed to get harder as you go along, but there isn't much of a difficulty ramp in GH:A: Songs in the last tier, like Stone Temple Pilots' "Sex Type Thing," are arguably easier than songs in the first tier, like "Draw the Line." The whole game seems to hover around the middle-difficulty area, which should placate people who thought that Guitar Hero III was too tough. There's really nothing here harder than, say, GH3's "Pride and Joy."
GH:A contains only one boss battle, a gameplay mechanic which was introduced in Guitar Hero III and met with much criticism due to difficulty and balance issues. This time around, your duel with (who else?) Joe Perry goes a lot more smoothly. You get to fire the first shot, and as long as you consistently block Perry from grabbing power-ups, it's a fair fight.
Graphically, it should be obvious that Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is just a reskinned version of GH3. There's a new cartoon intro featuring the group, and when you play Aerosmith songs, the usual band is replaced with in-game replicas of the Beantown five. Sadly, you're also stuck with a blue background for the notecharts on all those songs, which sometimes makes it hard to see the notes clearly. Otherwise, it's the same game as GH3. During non-Aerosmith songs, you can play as familiar characters like Axel Steel or Casey Lynch, purchase new guitars and outfits by performing well, and the engine more or less performs as it did in GH3 without any stuttering to speak of (reportedly, the note windows were tightened up a little bit, but we didn't notice anything in our testing).