A poor attempt to fight against Harmonix and Rock Band.
In my opinion the game suffers 3 very large flaws. The first is the vain attempt to jump on the Rock Band bandwagon. In my opinion, they should have made another Guitar/Bass game or maybe even have taken the band idea to a different route instead of doing it exactly the same as Rock Band.
The second is the selection of songs, I would have expected better from Activision (I did think the set list on GH3 was very good) but they did not live up to expectations, the songs by Tool only helped to highlight the lack of substance this game has got. Several songs in the game are duplicates from Rock Band and even a song from the DLC of GH3 (Antisocial by Trust) is on the game as one of the set list!
The third and final gripe with the game has already been mentioned - Activision's obsession with in game advertising. It does not look too bad until you play a song on the Times Square stage of the game. The number of adverts around the level is just depressing. This is pushed to the limit with the inclusion of cameos by artists like Haley Williams and Sting, another attempt to both sell the game and hide the problems that this game obviously has.
Add to all this the static nature of each song (no variation between animations for the song compared to Rock Band's MTV style approach) and a disappointing customisation mode and we have a very poor game by what is normally a decent company. Just like Skate was the bane of the Tony Hawk series, Rock Band is the thorn in Guitar Hero's side.