
Just from playing the demo for a half an hour and looking over the song list, it's apparent that GH3 is much more focused on the guitar "hero" concept than GH2 was. Simpler songs like "Lay Down" and "Even Flow" still have some pretty interesting note charts that will make you work for your glory. "The Metal" will kick your ass. The art direction has surprisingly stayed up to snuff. The band, the demo menus, and the venues are all very sexy and keep the same sort of artistic style as the previous games with some next-gen enhancement. I'm assuming the art team is different and they've done an extremely good job of keeping the direction consistant.
If I were asked to find something to gripe about, I'm finding that the use of master tracks is taking something away from the experience. Where the covers were finely tuned and adjusted with the game in mind, the master tracks give the game more of a fan-made mod feeling, like listening to a song and tapping buttons along with it rather than actually "playing" the song. I had suspected that this would an issue whenever I first saw videos of it, but not everyone may feel the same about it and I'm certain it's just something that will take some time to warm up to.
As for the guitar itself, the body is of a much higher quality than the 360's X-plorer even with the ability to break down into a more compact form, something I was worried about, and I believe it's about as big as the PS2's. The buttons, however, seem a bit cheap and depressed and I was still getting some delay issues with the whammy bar. I'm going to wait and see if the Rock Band guitar works for it before I jump into buying the bundle.