Stacy’s Mom – Fountains of Wayne
First Date – Blink-182
Semi-Charmed Life – Third Eye Blind
Pain – Jimmy Eat World
Pretty Fly (For A White Guy) – The Offspring

If these are the songs you think of when you think of “Van Halen,” you’ve got your perfect game.

(To be fair, everything else in the track list is mostly appropriate, and mostly Van Halen.)

The gameplay is standard GH fare. The career is GH:Metallica style, so you don’t have to play every single song to unlock every single song, but unlike Metallica you DO have to play every song to unlock the “Beat the Career” achievements. Expert fake guitar players looking for a challenge will enjoy the additional solos that appear at the end of the career (Eruption and Spanish Fly, namely,) which also have to be beaten before the achievement unlocks. Have fun with Eruption on Expert. I managed to beat it with 3 stars.

The track list has been widely available and, as far as my tastes go, quite enjoyable. Van Halen isn’t a band you’d see on my list of favorites, but they’re not terrible, and some of the other songs are enjoyable. The Third Eye Blind song is actually one I enjoyed back in middle school, and still do in a cheesy way. There are quite a few tracks repeated from other music game: White Wedding by Billy Idol, Painkiller by Judas Priest, Master Exploder by Tenacious D, and of course Hot For Teacher by Van Halen which was in World Tour.

The graphics appear to hearken back to GH: World Tour style graphics, rather than the more realistic looking GH5 character models. Frankly, I don’t care. If you’re the type of person who thinks of Stacy’s Mom when you think of Van Halen and who cares about the graphics in a Guitar Hero game, you MIGHT just be my exact opposite– the anti-John.

One major flaw for some people is that if you’ve sent away for your free copy of GH:VH after buying GH5, you’re probably going to get the game without a case, shipped only in a sleeve. I guess it’s too late to have buyer’s remorse, and really, you’re not paying for it, so who cares?

There honestly isn’t much to talk about with GH:VH. If you love Guitar Hero, you’ll enjoy this game. If you love Van Halen, you’ll enjoy this game. If you are considering getting your first fake instrument music game and you’re not the world’s biggest Van Halen fan, I’d suggest picking up a used copy of Rock Band before you make the jump in with GH:VH.