Reception
Guitar Hero III Mobile was well received upon its release. IGN considered it to be a "successful adaptation" of the Guitar Hero games to the cellphone keypad. They commented that while it may be tricky to download the songs for the game, requiring the user to be persistent during the download, the sound quality was excellent and the simplification down to three buttons from five makes the game "accessible to anybody with even a passing curiosity." CNET praised the quality of the sound and animations, as well as the ease of play. Cell Play referred to the game as "the true mobile port of rock," and praised the level of difficulty accomplished with the three button setup. They considered the shortened song length a negligible downside compared to the overall package. 1UP's review criticized the compact layout that led to hand cramps, and that the limited space on the mobile version only allowed two songs to be stored at a time. 1UP also lamented the shorted versions of the songs given the outstanding audio quality achieved on the mobile platform; their review summarized their experience as "As a literal interpretation of the Guitar Hero formula, there was apparently no room to alter the game to emphasize the strengths of the mobile platform." Guitar Hero III Mobile won two awards at the Qualcomm 2008 BREW Developers Conference for "Best Game" and "People's Choice Award". The game has been downloaded by users 2.5 million times, with both Verizon and Hands-On Mobile claiming that over 250,000 songs are played a day on the platform.
Guitar Hero III: Backstage Pass was also praised for the addition of role-playing elements and smaller minigames to bring the series in line with other mobile phone games. The mini-games were said to help build up the anticipation of the performance element of the game, making these feel as necessary elements of the player's band's career progression. The game won the 2009 Webby Award for Best Mobile Gaming application.
Guitar Hero World Tour Mobile has also received similar praise to its predecessors. Both CNet and IGN commented on the improvement in sound quality for both low- and high-end phones, with songs being "instantly recognizable" on low-phones, but noted that this quality came with the tradeoff of a larger memory footprint and slow downloads of songs through the cellular networks. However, Pocket Gamer UK noted that on the Java ME version, the songs are only slightly improved over that of a MIDI file. The addition of drums, which is said to effectively double amount of gameplay, and multiplayer to the mobile game was also well received.
Guitar Hero 5 was seen by Pocket Gamer UK to be yet another iteration of the series on mobile platforms, though the game still stands on its own given the numerous other music-based games for mobile phones. They praised the ability to use higher-quality versions of the songs though still allowing those with limited data plans to enjoy the game with the MIDI versions.
Read more about this topic: Guitar Hero Mobile Series
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