GH II still has that timeless gameplay, but everything surrounding it is disappointing.
GHII plays exactly the same as the fist game, but for those who haven't been tearing things up for a good while, the basic gameplay is very simple to understand. On the plastic guitar you play the game with, there are five coloured buttons and a little strumming bar. On the screen, you have a barrage of coloured notes coming down the screen, and when the notes hit the bottom line, you have to strum and hit the corresponding button on the guitar. There's also a whammy bar which you can push up and down on extended notes. There are certain notes which are small stars, and if you complete the set, then you'll attain a small amount of star power, which acts as a score multiplier. At the end of each song, you'll get a rating out of five stars and some cash to buy various bonuses.
In this respect, Guitar Hero II is fine, as it plays just how you would expect it to, although there have been a few bumps in difficulty since the first game. For instance, there are now triple chords instead of just double chords, and there is now more emphasis on hammer ons and pull offs. What makes the higher difficulty somewhat more bearable is the new Training mode which allows you to choose any part of any song, and play it at a much slower speed in order to really master it, though it's depressing that this is the only notable improvement over the first game.
So what does make Guitar Hero II such a disappointment? A lot of things, actually. Firstly, the song list is dreadful. The first game had a wonderful set-list filled with well known classics and undiscovered gems that resonated with me at least long after I was done with the game. GHII has complete garbage from most of the bands that have been chosen to be included. Why would I want to play "Life Wasted" by Pearl Jam when there are dozens of better, and less repetitive, songs? Warrant's "Cherry Pie" is easily one of the worst songs ever, and having Kiss in a game is always a bad sign. Even the songs that are obvious classics, such as Guns 'n Roses "Sweet Child of Mine", and Nirvana's "Heart Shaped Box" are butchered by people who have blatantly never heard the original version, as if they had, they would have never sung it so bad. The only song that is worth anything is the token Freezepop song "Less talk, more rokk", and that's a bonus song!
Further problems arise with regards to almost everything else. For a 360 port of a PS2 game, there doesn't seem to be any real graphical upgrade, apart from the generic use of light bloom to make everything look shiny. There is no online play, which was granted for in the PS2 version, but on a system where online is so important; the lack of it really does detract. Finally, the downloadable content available on Xbox Live is dreadful and overpriced, to the point where you just shouldn't bother at all.
After six months of continuously playing the original Guitar Hero, and becoming desperate for new material to work on, being lumped with GHII was saddening, as I soon lost the urge to continue as most of the songs just didn't appeal to me, and the ones that did had been murdered by Harmonix. While most second albums are a sophistication of the original, GHII falls flat on its face compared to the first one.