Guitar Hero World Tour

"Guitar Hero: World Dissapointment"

First off: I'd like to mention any score given to this is completely individual. Depending on numerous factors could be good or bad (or when compared to Rock Band 2). I'll try and put off as much as possible and give only the "facts" as I see them. I will simply lay out my experience on each facet of the game as I saw it, the Purchase, the Single Player, the Online, the New Features, the Menus, and my overall feeling--along with my goal of this review---towards the game Guitar Hero: World Tour.

Purchase: NUMEROUS people are opening kits to find busted instruments from the get-go. Not a few people, a LOT of people. This is unacceptable, I personally have opened two kits and after combining them...still don't have a complete working kit. Some without instruments entirely, some people have their drums registering as a Mic in game instead, the $300 Ion set is currently not compatible, and for any malfunction or losses in purchase, they require YOU to pay for shipping to fix THEIR defective products.

Single Player: I for one dislike the majority of the setlist. I dislike having to Encore every gig and have no option to refuse an encore. In GH2, GH3, and Rock Band you also did not need to play every song in the game to complete the career, the extra songs were in a bonus section. Also at the end of a song when it shows your stats, it takes a good 10 seconds before you can move on, despite only needing 1-2 to glance at your performance and wanting to get on and play. There is far too much loading/saving done that isn't necessary.

I dislike the character creator very much, all the faces look the same (and it's an ugly same). While the ability to edit shapes and sizes is more in detail than Rock Band 2, the overall structure and same-ness just disgusts me. I can't get any guy to look cool or a chick to look decent (And some RB2 chicks are downright hot). It is far too tedious to mess with every line and curve of the face to get a shape you don't hate (let alone look good) and for those less artistic or creative it is near impossible. I did it only for the achievements and proceeded to use pre-generated characters. Even the characters in-game in the band with you, their teeth are just strips of white and looks very poor, many of them look the exact same with just a new hairdo and torso clothing choice.

The Custom Tracks is a good concept---but not being able to bring them to Practice mode (to play the crazy Jordan-esque experiments) or use them in multi-player when EVERYONE has the same download song, is stupid. You can use it in Quickplay by yourself and that's about it. Creating and uploading one of your own is extremely tedious too.

As a drummer, I HATE the Star Power (as opposed to Rock Band) which I usually lose multiplier trying to deploy. It takes a second to actually start after I hit to activate, and due to having to mix it in somehow at any random point makes it very difficult to pull off without missing. Not to mention more often than not it doesn't even register and I have to completely stop my song to hit the cymbals 3-4 times to get it to work which ruins everything. During very fast or numerous note segments that you may NEED Star Power to survive, you can barely afford the time to activate and find the groove again (assuming it activates on the first try too). I like being able to activate it anywhere as opposed to Rock Band 2....but it's just more hassle than help. As a drummer in real life, you can't just break off and hit some cymbals for a second and then go back to the beat, they needed to include a little more "invulnerability" or something to compensate for this. I don't want to activate in a part with no notes either, giving me a petty bonus.

I'm not a vocalist, and aside from playing one song due to an achievement, won't play any more of it. But the very first song in the game despite on Easy mode, it was surprisingly difficult to land a note---let alone I couldn't really tell if I was hitting a note or not, and no matter how slight I changed my pitch, the marker just jumped all over.

Multiplayer: Compared to Rock Band, every aspect of this is hideous. When you try to join a band game--instead of sitting in a room waiting for more instruments and being able to look at the players GT, career stats, talk to them and so on... and then choosing when to start, with whatever number of players you choose, and then where to go after that....you just wait until it starts you. You look at at screen that says "Finding/Found 1-4 players" and then it either starts with 2-4 at a random moment, or stops and starts the search over. After a gig, it does not show individual stats or % notes hit or # of stars or anything after a gig, just "Continue/Quit".

Picking difficulty BEFORE picking song is asinine, as the best songs to play are generally the hardest---and few drummers (or any instrument for that matter) want to fail "Trapped Under Ice" every 2 seconds....so their answer is to play EVERYTHING on Hard/Medium in case a difficult song is picked? Boring! Let me play at the difficulty I want to play at. In Rock Band 2, you can play the songs being allowed to fail out 2 times and be revived, and a 3rd hoping to finish before finally dropping out. Your bandmates Star Power also boosts you too, to prevent failing from happening. This allows everyone to play on their favorite difficulty even if they know they normally couldn't play the song solo. Not to mention, Star Power is shared for all 4 players, and thus people steal others power, or prevent somebody from saving themselves when they are about to fail.

Speaking of failing, there is just a small meter at the corner of the screen to see who is doing well and who is not, which you can rarely afford time to look at. Instead of having a heads up or even an "outro" so to say, it just instantly cuts to nothing and you get booed, with nothing you can do about it. So when your star power is stolen, or you can't use your own star power to save somebody else (if you even are aware they're about to fail) because he was stuck on a song on a difficulty to high for him before the song got picked.....it leads to mountains of fun, right? Wrong. It's almost as if you need to play with people you KNOW, and that you have strategies of when to save and use star power and how to decide how to divide it up between you all, if you need to worry about survival or if you're going for points (Which you can't see anyway due to no stats/breakdown after the song....)

If somebody quits while in the room or during a song, EVERY player is dropped and must restart the searching process on their own. Instead of just having them leave and go back to the waiting room, and being able to either start up again or find more players like Rock Band 2, the tedious endeavor starts all over again.

I understand they can't steal EVERYTHING from Rock Band 2, but some of these features are completely logical and pretty much expected. I want to look at a performance level after a gig and I can't? I can't pick the difficulty I desire? Bob Smith steals my earned star power so he can play 6 notes while I need it to prevent failing? Gimmie a break!

Menus: Slow, too much loading/saving, not smooth at all. As mentioned in the multiplayer, numerous options or things to look at that I once took for granted as expected and "standard" in games are now completely non-existent. Even the little things such as when you go to play Solo and it has 3 options of Single, Band, Training or something like that, despite only 2 highlighted options as you can't have a one man band, 1 push of a button to scroll down highlights the option that I can't even select---whereas every game since the dawn of when games had menus with options it would skip over un-selectable options. (If you could follow that potentially confusing paragraph)

New Features: The slide bar is more trouble than it's worth. It's not worth bothering on short easy segments, and way too inconsistent or difficult on hard segements. Let alone moving one hand off the frets/strum bar--to guess and attempt to move around and hope to hit all the notes and then get back on time in the span of a few seconds is preposterous. Many times the slide bar just goes off by itself and ruins your multiplier. Thankfully, the option is able to be turned off---or else the game would be near unplayable.

Some good things: I DO really like the guitar though (After turning slide bar off) and I DO really like the drum set (assuming it works) though I wish the pedal was a bit better. It does have a few tweaks that I prefer over Rock Band 2, but they are few and far between---let alone make up for the things that are vastly superior on Rock Band 2. It may be worth noting that until this game came out, I liked Guitar Hero much more than Rock Band, despite being a Drummer and sucking at Guitar. Unfortunately, this game does not match up to a 200 dollar price tag, or even a 60 dollar game only.

All in all, there are many people left very dissapointed. I was expecting and hoping this game to be amazing and people are just really let down with every facet of the game. But when numerous people are being sent 1-3 defective instruments in their band kit, and after return and picking up another kit---still contains busted instruments (in some cases a missing Mic.) is beyond acceptable. I work at a Gamestop and numerous customers are returning kits and we have none left in stock to sell.

I understand not every issue I have with this game is shared by everyone. Some of you have perfectly working instruments. Some of you like the setlist that I do not like. Some of you have not played Rock Band 2 much and are not familiar with what many now feel as a much smoother, more logical, easier to use and all around more functional system of playing a game. Some of you may disagree entirely and (somehow) think that GHWT is smoother and has more/better features than RB2. This game seems rushed to make the holiday season, clearly concerned more about making money and competing with Rock Band 2 instead of pushing back a month or so, and fixing these issues. This COULD be a very fun game, but it seems they don't care enough about the consumer and just the consumers dollar.

I know this review may not change many opinions of the game, but I DO hope that it at least makes you think twice before buying at a high price tag. Research the game a little more, play Rock Band 2 and experience the different modes of that and compare to see the differences. If you have never played a music game before, GHWT could possibly blow you away---until you play a different music game.

Thank you for taking the time to read this extensive review.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 10/29/08

Game Release: Guitar Hero World Tour (Band Kit) (US, 10/26/08)