Ah, clone hero. This is pretty much as close of an endgame as you can get when it comes to having an accessible casual guitar hero game out there. This shit is the swiss army knife of guitar hero, as it practically works with everything. If you have a 5-fret guitar for pretty much any console, this supports it (some PC fenangling may be required). If you want to play a song from a guitar hero or rock band game, people have converted pretty much every main and DLC song from both series to work here. If you have custom songs for either previous guitar hero clone games or custom DLC tracks for rock band games, you can easily convert them to work here too. The rock band drums and keyboard even work!!! I think that the timing windows are more forgiving than actual guitar hero games but frankly only the hardest of the hardcore players are even really going to notice that kind of thing. The only minor gripes that I have is that there's no rock-band style co-op way to play songs where everyone shares a rock meter and can revive and whatnot, there's no vocals implemented in any form, and the vibes of playing with the game-rendered mocap guitar hero bands and stages aren't preserved as this is primarily just a song player. Also for a lot of custom songs you kind of just have to hope that a custom charter has the same music taste as you because of what I can tell charting new songs is really hard so yeah (where the FUCK are my idolmaster customs?!?!?) Also Also a lot of customs are naturally difficulty creeped to accustom more seasoned players so new players usually have to stick to official rips or customs from people generous enough to do full-difficulty charts. But despite those various gripes, if you want to just get into playing a vast selection of songs either by yourself or in a party group with minimal strings attached, this game is OP. I've spent so many hours with so many different people playing all sorts of different songs with this game, it truly is one of the few games that can honestly bring everyone together in a way that the limited setlists of regular guitar hero/rock band games can't. Part of the reason why I feel like guitar hero hasn't tried another reboot attempt is just from the fact this game borderline invalidates any need for something like that to be made, the fans have basically perfected the platform at this point. Go hunt down an X-plorer and get shredding already, what are you waiting for?!?

Simply put, the best feeling GH-like you will ever play. This engine feels perfect, it’s so easy to set up and calibrate, and so customizable that there’s really nothing to complain about here.

Combine that with the ludicrous amounts of custom content (that’s often better than anything from the official games) available for this game thanks to the incredibly talented and constantly active community, and you have a package that’s damn near impossible to turn down.

I gotta say I still miss the animated backgrounds from the base games (tho there is a workaround using pre-rendered videos, but it’s just not the same imo) and the career modes (no workaround for these as far as I know), and that alone is good enough reason for me to continue to go back to the official games.

If this game were able to mimic those features it would be a 10 for me, at the very least it’s without a doubt the most comprehensive experience for quickplay, and the easiest to slip into on a whim. Extremely accessible and perfectly caters to every level of player, thank god for the fan community