Guitar Hero - Van Halen

Charting "Eruption" was always going to be the test. Eddie Van Halen's tapping runs do not translate cleanly into five coloured buttons, and the attempt here produces one of the most punishing stretches of note-matching in the whole franchise, a blur of hammer-ons that most players will fail long before they learn it. That is the honest appeal of this one. It is a Guitar Hero built around a guitarist whose playing actively resists the format.

The setlist leans hard on the David Lee Roth years, with a run of instrumental showcases pulled out as their own challenges, and it fills the rest of the disc with guest acts rather than deeper cuts from the band's later catalogue. Roth's re-recorded vocals sit oddly against the studio versions people remember, and the guest tracks feel less like curation than ballast. Wolfgang Van Halen appears as the band's bassist, which dates the project precisely to the late-2000s touring lineup and quietly rewrites who is on stage for songs recorded decades earlier.

Mechanically it is the Guitar Hero 5 engine, which on PS2 means a stripped-back but functional version of the drop-in band play, star power, and career progression the series had settled into by then. Nothing is broken. Nothing is new either. Activision was shipping several of these a year by 2009 and the seams show: venues that repeat, a career structure with little shape to it, presentation that treats one of rock's great live bands as a series of loading screens between charts.

It was handed out free with Guitar Hero 5 preorders in North America, which tells you what the publisher thought it had. The strange thing is that the guitar work survives the packaging. Sit with the solo challenges long enough and the plastic controller stops being a toy and becomes a way of measuring exactly how much faster Eddie's hands moved than yours ever will.