Game Overview
If you are anything like us you'll have just got into Guitar Hero having missed number 2 and picked up number 3 just before Christmas. Having blasted through Guitar Hero 3 and still playing it daily trying to better scores, beat the Hard difficulty level and show your mates how real rock legends jam we were itching to get our hands on Guitar Hero 2 and see if it was as good as GH3, many people had told us that 2 was the better game but we didn't want to take someone else’s word for it we wanted to find out for ourselves.

We looked high and low but just couldn't find Guitar Hero 2 Solus (The game on it's own) until Gameplay.co.uk had it listed as being released on 25th January 2008. Did Activision never release the game separately? No one seemed to know but we didn't care, it was our chance to get hold of the Solus and get jamming! Queue the nice people at Activision and BHPR.

After an agonizing wait Guitar Hero 2 arrived in the post and we were off, no stopping us now! Time to get jamming through the career mode and a completely new set of songs! The excitement levels were too much to handle and in the process of getting setup a cup of tea went flying, there was no time to clean it up though, this was Guitar Hero 2!

Everything seemed very similar to what we were used to with Guitar Hero 3 (sounds strange comparing something to a newer game), menus and song selection all virtually the same, in game options all seemed the same, the only thing that is missing is Battle mode. In our opinion though Guitar Hero 3 didn't gain much when Battle mode was added to the mix so we didn't miss this.

The career mode doesn't have a storyline and encores aren't achieved by playing on easy so no extra songs, you'll need to play through on medium to unlock those tracks which we thought was a little unfair on the people who struggle with anything other than easy mode. Everything in game looks fairly similar but a lot more cartoon like, graphics are definitely better in GH3. What is also a lot better in GH3 is the track list. GH2 suffers, in our opinion, from a terrible track list, all the songs are "made famous by" tracks (covers in other words) and not great covers at that. Don't get us wrong, some are brilliant and sound spot on but there are quite a few that seem to be a lot slower than the original which causes you to mess up half way through the song when you are expecting a song to kick in and it doesn't for a second or two.

Another small downer about GH2 is that it doesn't show you on the HUD your current note count so it is very difficult to know how well you are doing or if you are close to that illusive note streak achievement. This has been added in to Guitar Hero 3 but we'd have thought this would have been in 2. Obviously not though!

Out of all the standard tracks on the game we knew about a handful of them. We are in our mid to late twenties so we have had enough time on this planet to hear a song or two but the majority of tracks were completely new to us and if we are honest weren't all that great. The ones we did know virtually made up for it though, Monkey Wrench by the Foo Fighters, Heart Shaped Box by Nirvana, Salvation by Rancid and the Top Gear theme tune 'Jessica' to name a few. It was the track list that let us down the most and the fact that most of the songs were covers. We want to be on a cyber stage, playing to a cyber crowd the songs that we know and can really get in to, not playing songs that we have never heard before and are about as enjoyable to play as a fart in the wind!! (wind takes away the smell!) A big let down and although there are plenty of songs that can be downloaded, these will cost you almost 200ms points per song.

Our Conclusions
Although we still aren't sure on the selection of songs the game still feels very enjoyable and fun to play, given that, you can almost look past the naf soundtrack, however, we are here to give it to you straight, with Guitar Hero 3 out as well at the moment, if you can afford one of these games and one only then don't look any further than Guitar Hero 3. GH2 is fun but you need to be hardcore Rock 'n' Roll fan of about 35-40 years old, unfortunately that’s not the target age.

Overall Score: 8/10

Thanks to Jo at BHPR and Activision