In addition to using master recordings for each song, the songs have been charted to use gameplay features introduced in World Tour including the open bass strumming & slider sections for intense solos using the touchpad on the guitar bundled with World Tour.

[4] The game borrows gameplay and graphical elements from Guitar Hero: Metallica, including the "Expert+" difficulty level using two bass drum pedals and the rearrangement of on-screen meters for band mode.

[3][4] Smash Hits includes a Music Studio creation mode and is compatible with the "GHTunes" custom song sharing service present in World Tour and Metallica.

[4] The career mode follows the same star-tier system used in Metallica, requiring players to earn a fixed number of stars to proceed from one tier to the next.

[6] Though the game was initially called Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits, cover art for the game in North America had shown the title had changed to Guitar Hero: Smash Hits.

[11] In North America, various retailers provided pre-order incentives for those who reserved Smash Hits.

Although the game supports user-created songs through the "GHTunes" service (common to Guitar Hero World Tour and Guitar Hero: Metallica), other existing downloadable content does not work with Smash Hits.

[14] Jeff Gerstmann of Giant Bomb commented that "something about the game's full [...] price tag doesn't quite feel right" and reaffirmed that being able to select a handful of the songs to play again would have been a preferred method of distribution.

[25] Tom Bramwell of Eurogamer further suggested that a simultaneous release of both the retail product and the same songs as downloadable content would have been an improvement.

[26] Addition of full band tracking for the songs was considered helpful to avoid making the game's material feel like "warmed-over leftovers from the series' past", according to Gerstmann.

[25] The mixing of some of the songs was also considered to be off, with Roper specifically noting a too-loud bass and too-soft vocals for "No One Knows".

[14][25] Roper also noted that the new features of Guitar Hero World Tour, particularly the use of "slider notes" that use either the World Tour touchpad or simple tapping without strumming on any other guitar controller's frets, makes many of the more difficult parts of the songs easily passed, requiring less technical skill to complete; Roper cited his ability to easily pass the first solo in what is considered to be the series' most difficult song, "Through the Fire and Flames" in Smash Hits while he could not pass this section on Guitar Hero III.

[14] In contrast, Abbie Heppe of G4 TV found the recreation of the note tracking to have "varying degrees of success", noting that while some of the guitar solos are more manageable, there were questionable sections in other songs arising from the nature of Star Power phrases when it was changed in Guitar Hero III.