I remember quite vividly when Guitar Hero first burst onto the scenes here in the UK. I’d never seen it before, and it was launching here sometime after it had already become hugely popular in the US – so I’d heard all about it on gaming message boards, with the US hardcore raving about the new, revolutionary rhythm game.

At first I found it fiendishly difficult, but after some time I’d worked my way up to hard and then even expert – and I was having amazing fun. I was in love from there, and I’ve been with the rhythm genre for many years since.

In recent years my allegiance has switched to EA, MTV and Harmonix’s Rock Band franchise – but perhaps a collection of the tracks I love most from the first three Guitar Hero titles is enough to draw me back?

Greatest Hits (Smash Hits in the USA) does exactly what the name suggests and has taken the greatest and most popular tracks from the first five titles in the series – Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero 2, Rock the 80s, Guitar Hero 3 and Guitar Hero Aerosmith. Shipping on Wii, PS3, PS2 and 360, the game awards many gamers who didn’t own a PS2 the chance to play those early tracks.

The game looks feels and plays like Guitar Hero. In fact, under the hood it’s almost exactly the same game as last year’s Guitar Hero: World Tour.

The game comes packed with the ‘GHTunes’ feature that allows you to create and upload your own tracks and has the same character creation system as World Tour. It also keeps the new manner of playing through gigs in sets of several songs rather than individual songs one at a time.

Looks like... Guitar Hero.

All the standard Guitar Hero features are here – the career mode you can play through single player or as a group, quick play, online modes, and a store in which you can spend your rock dollars on new equipment or clothes for your character.

So what’s new, you ask? Well, every song has been upgraded so it can be played as an entire band. You can now drum or sing along to “Through the Fire and Flames” while somebody shreds on the track’s intense guitar solos.

This is a bit of an interesting issue in itself, as many of the songs from the original Guitar Hero games were picked because they were amazing on guitar – leaving many tracks in this collection mundane or boring for the singer or drummer. While I was hugely excited to play Dragonforce on guitar, I can’t say I was hugely excited to play the song’s repetitive blast-beat on the drums.

On the bright side, all of the guitar tracks in the game have been re-charted, providing different and most often more difficult takes on the charts you’d have to play in previous games. Hardcore fans of the series including myself love the ramped-up difficulty bought with Guitar Hero 3, so this is a welcome addition.

Strangely, Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits won’t feature Downloadable Content and it is not compatible with any World Tour DLC already on your Hard Drive. Tracks cannot be exported from either game, so you’ll have to disc swap if you want to play some Guitar Hero classics.

Plays like... Guitar Hero.

Perhaps the most obvious and greatest thing World Tour brings to the table is that all of the tracks that were cover versions in the early Guitar Hero games are original master tracks, meaning you’re playing along to the actual rock stars, not some half baked cover version.

In the few cases the master versions weren’t available, Activision have gone the extra mile and obtained live versions of the real band playing over a cover band. Two thumbs up.

It can’t be said that Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits is a bad game – it’s not. It’s a good game. Its jam packed with all the same great features World Tour had and has a selection of great if guitar-centric tracks. The game feels like a huge retread of areas already visited – and feels more like an expansion than a full game as the price tag suggests.

In truth, all Greatest Hits really brings to the table is its track list – so we recommend you take a look at the list and see if you like it. The only issue is that you may find yourself wondering like us why it isn’t a set of downloadable tracks for your World Tour disc.

- 7 / 10

Version Tested: 360