Guitar Hero - Metallica

Expert+ is the detail that gives this one away. Neversoft built a difficulty tier specifically so drummers could run a second kick pedal and approximate Lars Ulrich's double-bass work on tracks like One and Dyers Eve, which is an absurd amount of engineering effort spent on a single band's rhythm section. On PS2, where the drum peripheral support was thinner and the audience older, that gesture still says something about the intent: this was made by people who took the assignment seriously rather than stamping a logo on the existing engine.

The structure is the familiar Guitar Hero World Tour architecture, note highways for guitar, bass, drums and vocals, with career progression through venues. What changes is the curation. Twenty-eight Metallica songs sit alongside a supporting setlist drawn from acts the band cites or toured with, so Mercyful Fate and Diamond Head share space with Alice in Chains and Queen. It plays less like a greatest-hits package and more like an argument about lineage, and the deep cuts reward people who already own the records.

Metallica themselves appear as playable avatars with era-specific looks, and the game folds in interview footage and photos as unlockables. That material has aged better than the character models, which were already at the edge of what the PS2 could do and now read as stiff. The PS2 build is the compromise version across the board: fewer online features, a less detailed presentation, longer loads. The charting, which is the part that matters, survives intact.

Difficulty is the honest sticking point. Metallica's rhythm guitar parts are dense, fast and repetitive in a way that punishes anyone who learned Guitar Hero on pop-punk, and Master of Puppets on Expert remains one of the genre's genuine walls. There is no difficulty scaling that makes downpicking for eight minutes pleasant. You either want that fight or you do not.

As a band-dedicated title it works because the band suited the format. Metallica's catalogue is built from riffs with clear shapes, which is exactly what a five-fret controller can represent, and the sequencing of a career mode around album eras gives the thing a spine that the annual releases lacked. Plastic instruments went out of fashion and took the whole genre with them, but the craft here is still visible in every chart.