(note: my review is based on expert difficulty, because I'm a beast man)
Bought the game yesterday. Had a BLAST playing it until 3:00 this morning. I woke up today and my hand hurts like Hell. My fingers are sore just like when I first started playing real guitar.
For those out there that are Guitar Hero beasts, you won't be disappointed. This game will blow your dick off towards the latter half of the campaign. I never failed a song on the career mode on GHII (except for Jordan, but that's a different story), but I failed about 5 songs multiple times on GHIII. Speaking of failing, just wait until you get to the final boss battle on expert.
Being a mediocre guitar and bass player (I can't chicken pick incredibly fast or do arpeggios whilst sweeping or any other leet man guitar techniques), I can say that some of these songs are easier to play on a real guitar. Here's a nice preview of what you can expect on expert on the higher tier songs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnPsPM5Jw8A
(embedded youtube isn't working right now for some reason, sorry)
Overall, the song list is awesome. I remember playing through GHII on expert, and for many of the songs, thinking to myself, "Wow, this song is AIDS. I can't wait to get through with this." I've only felt that way about one song in GHIII, and it was one that took me 7-8 tries to beat and it wasn't even that hard of a song. It probably helps that the song list is better in general, but the note charts just seem more fun to me than in GHII. Many of the songs around the middle tiers in GHII played the same note section over and over and over and over, and it just pissed me off playing it, because they were easy sections, just really tedious. I haven't really experienced many songs like that at all. I haven't gotten a chance to play any of the bonus songs yet but I hear the note charts on those are awesome.
To give you a good idea of how much I hated GHII's note chart, the only songs I even enjoy playing on GHII now are Jordan, Six, Thunderhorse, Gemini, Hangar 18, Misirlou, and Institutionalized. I think pretty much all of the other songs have shitty note charts that are boring to play for the most part. That seems to be fixed in GHIII, with many of the low and middle tier songs having interesting and fun sections throughout them so it never really becomes a chore to play any particular song. The only chore is having to beat some of the ridiculous songs at the end, but that's entirely different.
SO, go buy the game, kids. Your penis will fall off (and your left hand).
