Under the dead of night, with the four horsemen ride! Or choose your fate and die!

The Charge:

“We’ll hunt you down without mercy! We’ll hunt you down all nightmare long!”

Opening Statement:

Specialty packs seem to be the wave of the future as far as music games go. No longer looking at a “one a year” approach to Activision’s Guitar Hero cash cow, and with Rock Band venturing into a similar “band focused” approach, it’s only a matter of time before your favorite rock act has their own branded version of Rock Band or Guitar Hero. After being approached by both MTV and Activision, the Guitar Hero package obviously appealed more to Metallica’s entrepreneurial side, and the Gods of plastic guitar rock have seen fit to bless us with Guitar Hero: Metallica. Is it a match made in metal heaven?

Facts of the Case:

Metallica has been leading every Rock Band or Guitar Hero request poll since day one. Whenever the question was asked, “What song/band do you want to see?” It was their name you’d see more often than any other (with Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden and AC/DC trailing behind).  It’s only fitting that they receive the royal treatment, and it doesn’t get much more royal than this. You play as Metallica for several of their most well-known songs, and there’s a smattering of tracks from other bands, all hand-picked by Metallica, filling in the remainder of the setlist. Tossed  in is some semblance of a plot focusing on a group of wanna-be headbangers who audition to open for Metallica and follow them around on tour, which is basically an excuse to have your own band play the non-Met tracks. Beyond that, you surely know the drill, you rock, you roll, a good time is had by all.

Lashing out the action, returning the reaction. Weak are ripped and torn away!

The Evidence:

A music/rhythm game succeeds or fails on the strength of its setlist, and GH:Metallica is no exception. Thankfully, when you’re looking at a back catalog as large and varied as Metallica’s, you’ve got a lot of gold to choose from. 28 Metallica tracks in total make the cut, and they do a relatively solid job of covering all the bases.

The early, thrashier years are pretty well represented, and I can’t really say there were any poor choices made outside of the relatively weak representation of “Kill ‘Em All”. The iconic “Master of Puppets”, considered by many to be the zenith of Metallica’s ascension to Metal Gods, is well represented with 6 tracks (out of the 8 on the album). “…And Justice For All” (my favorite of their classic “pre-black” albums) comes out pretty good with 3 tracks (including, of course, “One”.)

The fact that Metallica’s ’91 self-titled album (The Black Album) features another huge block of tracks is sure to tweak some of the hardcore old-school fans who weren’t old enough to buy the classic albums when they were released. Everyone else, read: everyone who’s sane, should be more than happy with the choices made here. You get all the best tracks off of the album, the classic hits that made Metallica the driving force in rock music that they are today. In total 6 tracks, including “Enter Sandman” and my personal pick for best Metallica ballad, “The Unforgiven” are included.

Load and Reload see a small helping of tracks, and its here that the choices start to get a little weaker. I can’t slight the developers for the songs they’ve chosen, god knows everyone but me seems to love the blathering trash-rock vibe of “Fuel”, but I can’t help but feel that there could have been stronger representatives from these albums (No “Until it Sleeps”?). Only two tracks appear off of Load, which to me is criminal, as I consider Load to be one of the most unfairly maligned albums of the 90′s. Reload on the other hand, well, one track would have been fine, but they saw fit to “grace” us with a second.

So let it be written! So let it be done! I'm sent here by the chosen one!

St. Anger gets a solitary track in “Frantic”, which is probably a good thing, though “Some Kind of Monster” would have been a much better choice, and tossed in is the curious addition of “No Leaf Clover” from the S&M experiment that saw Metallica performing with an orchestra led by the late Michael Kamen.

Difficulty is up there for sure, but falls a little short of the later bits of Guitar Hero III. At any rate, the charts for each tune all feel suitably authentic, and the drums in particular are a goddamn beast! The game also tucks enough bonus material in there to warrant a look-see.

Technically, the game is easily the best looking product to come out of the Guitar Hero camp, and is easily the best entry in the series since the second game hit so many years ago. Directly comparing to Rock Band, GH: Metallica does have the more “stylish but real” feel of Rock Band, eschewing the tacky over-the-top aesthetics of the recent Guitar Hero offerings (Aerosmith included). The opening sequence, set to Ennio Moriccone’s “Ecstasy of Gold” echoes the opening of your traditional Metallica concert, and the visual presentation throws you headlong into the game, really giving you that awesome, “I am a rock god!” feeling. When playing as the boys, they look fantastic and easily identifiable, with great motion capture work for their signature moves. The other Guitar Hero characters also make appearances, and their “Metallica-like” makeovers suit the game well and look great.

The audio is nothing shy of fantastic. My hat is off to the sound engineers at Neversoft. Metallica has never been particularly well-known for production quality, and most of the classic tracks present here absolutely obliterate anything found on Metallica’s CD’s. Even the Death Magnetic material has a little bit of extra punch and less crackle and hiss than the CD version. Any Metallica fan yearning for a better sounding version of everything from “Kill ‘Em All” to “…And Justice for All” really needs to check out what’s on display here. Even later material just sounds more alive and punchy than the recorded versions. I’d love to see these masters released on CD.

Rebuttal Witness:

Metallica’s setlist can’t really be slighted. It’s an awesome collection of tunes, and most of the anthems are present. The same, however, cannot be said for the bonus tracks. Some of the inclusions are downright awesome, and cover some of my favorite bands, “Albatross” by Corrosion of Conformity has long been a favorite of mine, and I never thought I’d EVER be playing a Kyuss tune in one of these games. For the most part, however, I have to wonder how they came to most of the tracks on the list. Having been hand-picked by the band, it’s all subject to taste of course, but I can’t help but scratch my head at some of the choices.

The significant lack of “Death Magnetic” material is also worth mentioning, but thankfully, the superlative album is available as downloadable content for GHIII and GH: World Tour and is fully compatible with GH: Metallica. Still, the fact that this stuff wasn’t just on the disc (especially considering the relatively recent release of the album, and the overwhelmingly positive reception to it) is a bit of a cheese-off.

Hey! I'm your life! I'm the one who takes you there!

My biggest complaint is with the career mode. That first block of tunes that kicks it off like you’re participating in a Metallica concert feels awesome. Barely three songs in, the flow gets broken by the “story” and the typically foolish Guitar Hero animated sequences make their presence known. I’d have preferred a 28-song marathon concert without breaks in the action (perhaps with in-game cutscenes between songs making it feel more like a seamless concert). Instead the awesome feeling of the first 10 minutes is destroyed, only to reappear infrequently every so often. I’d have preferred it if the bonus tunes did not appear in the setlist proper, kind of like the unlockable tracks in the classic GH games.

Closing Statement:

Guitar Hero: Metallica sets the bar high. We definitely haven’t seen the last of these band-centric offerings; Van Halen is rumored to be around the corner, and the Rock Band brand is bringing The Beatles to market in the fall, and both would have to be mighty fine products to live up to this monster. Just when my interest in the Guitar Hero franchise was on life support, along comes Metallica to give the genre the kick in the pants it so badly needed.

The Verdict:

Platform: Sony Playstation 3/Microsoft Xbox360/Nintendo Wii/Sony Playstation 2 (Xbox360 Version Reviewed)
Developer: Neversoft Entertainment
Publisher: Activision
Release Date: March 29, 2009
Rated: T (13+) for Teen