EDIT: The strum bar problem is more severe than I thought. I've gone through three guitars and more and more people are having the same problem. I would probably avoid purchasing it now simply because of this.

2nd EDIT: After going through 3 guitars and moving my setup around I got my money back at gamestop.DON'T PURCHASE

I'm so surprised how well they nailed it. Aside from some weird song choices they actually made significant changes that work really well for this relaunch. I'll be putting up a review over it once I've put in enough time to know that the micro transactions don't become an issue but I'm quite pleased with everything so far.

It's worth pointing out that I along with several other people on the disgusting part of the web (Reddit, Neogaf, GameFAQs) have ran into some strum bar problems which causes intermittent double taps or missed taps. If picking up the game it's absolutely worth it to get it at a brick and mortar store so if need be, you can exchange it quickly and easily.

A couple notes:

• The new guitar is great. Deciding to add a 6th button and lining them up into two rows is a really good choice and works wonders at easing beginners in and makes it feel better and more accurate to actually playing a guitar. It makes the higher levels of the game a bit crazier but if you typically play on expert you will move up the difficulty pretty quickly.
• Overall the note charts feel good and accurate to how you would play on a guitar with some small exceptions. The harder the difficulty the better job it does with this.
• I'm a big fan of stupid FMV and while it doesn't pull directly into crazy town, there are still some pretty good moments to be seen from the LIVE side of the game. The other musicians in the videos are all from real bands and while they aren't playing the music they do add a lot of character.
• They nailed the presentation 1. The different sets in the LIVE portion of the game accurately reflect the type of music you are playing by choosing There are some times where people are too hype for the music you are currently playing like with the Portland Cloud Orchestra (Think The Lumineers or Mumford and Sons) but overall it still works really well.
• They nailed the presentation 2. The GHTV portion is very far and away more impressive than I anticipated. The flow of getting into gameplay with the channels is very well done and presentation of the channels themselves are excellent. They have timed hour/half hour blocks of genres that between songs and blocks, have wonderfully produced channel bumpers and clips of new and available music. It really does feel like a modern music video channel. Other than very short promotions for new videos (mostly to line up the scheduling time) there's no advertisement but the cynic in me want's to point out it's still Activision.
• GHTV has a LEVELING SYSTEM which will get you different "hero powers" (Think 2x score or auto play notes) track skins and player title cards. You level up by being grouped up with 9 other players playing the song and you fight up and down the scoreboard during the song. You then get coins and XP depending on your placement on the board. You use those coins to buy said hero powers, skins, cards and TOKENS (more later) The fact that it's Activision and that it doesn't play the RIPPING MODERN WARFARE 2 LEVEL UP GUITAR whenever you level up is a god damn shame.
• Song choice is hit or miss. I found myself just sitting on channels playing music that I'm not super familiar with and still having a blast. The song list is out there (and officially on spotify) and it's worth looking at to know what you're getting yourself into. I have to say that the curation they did is pretty good for fun guitar music. There's some real shit choices like bangarang, some god awful eminem song and some dance/pop tracks to get more appeal but you pretty much only have to play through them once in the LIVE section. Anyone else remember how god awful Good Charlotte was? Man, rock music in the 00s really was the fucking worse.

Now for what everyone should be worried about

MICROTRANSACTIONS

In the GHTV portion you can play any of the 200+ songs at any point with the use of a token. The GHTV channels have done an excellent job holding my attention so that I've only used like 5 tokens so far and have accumulated 30 tokens after 3/4 hours play. You use coins or cash to buy more tokens and it does seem like the acquisition rate of tokens is a little too low but I need more time to truly figure it out. For sure if you like to only play songs you know then you will be needing to buy tokens with cash, especially if you purchase the other things that requires coins.

In addition there is also Guitar Hero PREMIUM which at first glance seems like the worst thing every but it's actually pretty good. GHP are specific setlists that have requirements to play them. It's unfortunate that the first thing you see is UNLOCK WITH PREMIUM CURRENCY but in reality you just need to play associated songs and have X number of stars on them. For example there is a playlist with a best of Guitar Hero and so you play a certain song by an artist that was featured on an early Guitar Hero like Rush or Pantera. It's premium because you either buy access to the setlist or you indirectly have to use tokens to play the prerequisite songs to access the playlist. Once you meet the requirements you then can play the GHP setlist and then receive a special reward like a unique title card or a coin/XP multiplier for the next couple of songs you play.

Overall I don't feel like the way I want to play Guitar Hero will drive me into paying money but that will be different from person to person and who knows how it's calculated out in the long term.

Overall I really like this game. Surprised at how much I like it. I don't know when I'll write the review because the nature of the microtransactions seems purposefully cloudy. If the game was the same but without the micro transactions I would probably give it a perfect score but time will tell how deep they planted them.

This has also made me think... if they put this much effort and money into THPS5 it would be fucking nuts how different/great it could have been. I'm a fan of music games first but for the good of all people I do wish they decided to go all the way with THPS5 instead of Guitar Hero. It's not like Rock Band 4 ended up giving this game a run for it's money anyway.

I'm having similar strumming problems. It seems more frequent on upstrums, I have two guitars and it's the same on both.