In the game, players use special instrument controllers to simulate the playing of lead and bass guitar, drums, and vocals for rock and other songs.
Players are awarded points by performing specific actions on the controllers to match notes that scroll on screen that correspond with the appropriate instrument.
[1] Guitar Hero 5 is distributed with 85 songs on-disc, many being from artists that have yet to have their music featured in a rhythm video game, and more than half having been published in the last decade.
Excluding its downloadable content, Guitar Hero 5 features 85 songs, all based on master recordings or live performances, from 83 musicians.
[2] Game director Brian Bright has called the track list "fresh"; 25% of the songs were released in the last 18 months, and more than 50% from the current decade.
[3] Unlike previous versions of the Guitar Hero series, in which players must work through a career mode to unlock all the songs in the game, all songs in Guitar Hero 5 are unlocked and are playable in any mode from the start.
Matt Helgeson of Game Informer called the track list "extremely diverse",[7] and Arthur Gies of GameSpy felt that the song selection was based on "careful consideration for the most part", to avoid songs with short-lived appeal.
[8] Erik Brudvig of IGN noted that while "the goal was to include a bit of everything", the range of songs on the track list "ensure[s] that nobody will like everything on the disc".
[11] On release of Guitar Hero 5, 35 of the songs from World Tour and 21 from Smash Hits are importable into Guitar Hero 5 for a small fee (approximately $0.10 per song), and are treated as downloadable content for the game playable in all game modes; the World Tour export was available on release, while the Smash Hits export was available a few days afterwards.
[16] The transfer process requires the player to enter a unique code from the World Tour or Smash Hits manual to be able to redownload available songs in a pack (on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3) or individual songs (on the Wii) that have been updated to include the new features.