Guitar Hero World Tour

"It strives to be Rock Band, and it pretty much is, but is it as good as Rock Band 2?"

I love and own pretty much all of the Guitar Hero games. Whilst Earthbound is still my favourite game, I can safely say my favourite game series overall is Guitar Hero. I decided to import the US version (which let me get a week earlier, but most of all, slightly cheaper too) and here I am after roughly two weeks of owning the game. I've seen most of what the game offers, and I like what I see.

As we all know, to compete with Rock Band, World Tour introduced Drums and Vocals into the mix. The game can be played solo in career, or with friends in band career or online. Firstly, Solo career is a little different than before, but nothing game changing. When you select your instrument (you can play a solo career for all four instruments, including the dull bass), you can then customise pretty much every aspect of your character. Pre-made classic characters return, along with many licensed characters, but you can also create your own characters. The customisation is much better than Rock Band, with you being able to change a lot about your character. Since Gibson fell out with Red Octane, there are no longer any Gibson guitars in the game. Instead, you can customise your guitar almost any way you want. When you select what instrument you use, you can change the guitar base, the neck, the head, what skin or graphics are on the guitar, the type of strings, where the pick-guard is, everything. This can also be done with all the other instruments; it's got the features of customising your Guitar in Rock Band (like putting rude words on your guitar etc), just without the pre-made guitars. I know it doesn't make much of a difference but I had fun tinkering around with my guitar, I personally think it looks pretty cool along with my incredibly normal and boring looking character. Once you get into the career, gigs are posted which you can participate in. Basically, a gig contains 3-6 songs with a hidden encore at the end of them. When you start a gig, you have to play through all the songs in one go (if you quit you simply resume on the song you quit at). Once the gig is complete, you can play any song in the gig by itself. Gigs are pretty much like tiers but they're presented differently, contain less or sometimes more songs, some also require you to pay for them (kinda like the bonus songs I guess) and don't seem to go in order of difficulty.

When playing through Expert guitar, the songs at first seemed just about the right difficulty. As I progressed though the game, the songs got more difficult, but right near the end they suddenly got easy. The last two gigs were challenging enough, but I managed to 100% a song in the third to last gig (at the time of writing I have 5* all songs on Expert Guitar, but I can't FC many songs) and the last few gigs weren't that hard at all. There doesn't seem to be much of a difficulty curve, also proved in the Drum career where some of the middle songs are more challenging than the later ones. Apart from that, solo tour is pretty much the same, you beat the song then carry on. You gain money like before (used to buy new characters or instruments, no bonus songs are available) but like in Rock Band you receive an amount after every song, and you also gain a Rock Ranking (basically think of money being experience, the more you get the higher your rank gets, it works like that). The infamous Guitar Battles from Guitar Hero III remain, however they're much better. There are only two in the whole Guitar career, and it's purely based on who has the higher score. The computer always gets 100%, but their multiplier isn't increased until certain parts of the song, meaning they don't get X4 until near the end. They're much more fun and enjoyable this time, especially since the two boss themes are better than GHIII's. It's all the same really, and it's fine how it is.

What about the multiplayer aspect of the game? Well, you can do Band Career (which can be played online), which is essentially career but with at least two people, so it's essentially just playing as a band, but with a song order instead. You can also do Band Quickplay, but the mechanics of the game change a little here. For starters, what about failing? In Rock Band, if one person fails then the whole Rock Meter falls until you fail or the person who failed gets revived. It's mostly like this in Guitar Hero. Under the Rock Meter all currently present instruments are shown with their separate meters behind them. When some one isn't doing very well, their meter falls. When this meter reaches the bottom, the whole band meter starts to fall, however the person who is failing doesn't get kicked off, they continue to play. This is where you use to star power to boost their meter, or just hope they play well enough soon. Star Power also works differently: It's shared. In solo play, collecting star power four times fills your meter up fully, where as twice is the required amount to use it. As far as I understood, when you play in a band, if you use star power it takes up one bar of it. This means you must have at least 4 bars full for everyone to use star power, but this also means people can be greedy and steal your star power, or just generally use star power every time it's gained, not letting anyone else use it. It's different from Rock Band but I have to admit I preferred Rock Band's quickplay. To be honest, the only thing I liked better about GHWT's band quickplay was that if someone gets disconnected whilst playing a song online, you don't just fail, you just carry on and finish the song, unlike in Rock Band where you must simply wait until you fail. Another new mode is the Band V Band mode. I'll admit I've never played this, purely because it has to be done online, and you can never find a vocalist online (I've found one vocalist online before). But I can take a guess as to how it works since I've played 2 V 2. Basically, only your band's highways (as the game calls them) are shown on the screen, then it simply tells you your band score, their band score, and a little meter to show which band is winning, simple as. All other modes are here though, Guitar Co Op, Pro-Face off, Face Off, Battle Mode, its all here and it's all the same. As with Rock Band, one of the main features is the ability to play as a band online, simply getting any members together and having fun.

The online, mainly the interface, has changed a lot though. It's incredibly confusing and I really didn't understand it. When you load up Xbox Live mode, all players, along with their ranks, are shown to the right. To the left you can look at your friends list and invite your friends as a specific instrument (I thought it was pretty cool when I received an invite asking me to play GHWT with my drums), choose which game mode you want to play, and set your preferences. This is where it falls. In preferences, you can choose which Rocker you want to use, which difficulty, whether or not you want Lefty Flip on, and the vocal style. This really doesn't work though. You have to go into preferences to change your difficulty? It's incredibly dumb compared to Rock Band. In Rock Band, you pick a song, and then choose a difficulty there. You may be able to do one song on Expert, but someone could pick a song you can't do, but in GHWT, you can't go down to Hard difficulty, you're just forced to play Expert. You barely get anytime to change your preferences in-between songs either (since eventually the cursor forces you to look at the different players), and it just really baffles me as to why they did this. I can play Guitar on Expert, but not vocals! Also, whenever you play a different difficulty with a different instrument, your preference sticks. I always play Guitar on Expert, but I can only do Vocals on Easy. I had a go at Vocals, and then went to play online; to my horror finding my difficulty preference was automatically set to Easy. It's just really annoying and sometimes confusing. When matchmaking, you're sometimes forced to play. When I search in Band Quickplay I usually want all four players. However on a number of occasions I have found one other player, then it forces me to play with them (since you then can't quit). The online of this really frustrates me at times, they may have changed a lot, but it's for the worse.

Now it's time to talk about each instrument in the game, how they work, and how they handle. First up: Guitar. Well, it's pretty simple really. Lead Guitar works, for the most part, exactly the same as any previous Guitar Hero game. However in a bid to make Guitar seem more interesting, Neversoft have added a few new features to Guitar to spice it up. Firstly, the Hammer On and Pull Off System, which allows you to hit notes without strumming in a sequence, has been improved. Guitar Hero III had a broken HO/PO system. The idea is that you simply hit the note at the time it crosses the bottom, without strumming. These special notes are shown without a black rim on the top. They always follow after a normal strummed note, and all the HO/PO can then be hit without strumming, provided you don't miss a note (in which you must start again, by simply strumming a HO/PO). In the original Guitar Hero the HO/PO were almost impossible to hit, Guitar Hero II then perfected this system, and Guitar Hero III made them perhaps too easy, giving the HO/PO no timing window. If you've played Guitar Hero Aerosmith, you'll know that the HO/PO were different, and they're exactly the same in World Tour. The HO/PO are a little easier to hit than GHII and Rock Band (well, I generally hit more HO/PO notes in WT than GHII and Rock Band), but you can no longer simply hold the fret to hit them. They've been fine-tuned, and they work, making the game slightly more challenging again and realistic. There are also a few parts where whilst you play a sustained note, other notes pop up which you simply hit, they're a little confusing at first but they don't pop up too often. The final additions are the slide sections. These notes, represented with a purple “rope” connecting them, can be hit without strumming at all. You don't have to start off the sequence, simply tap the fret button when the note hits the bottom and you hit it. The slide sections are mainly designed for the use of the new World Tour Guitar controller, which, to counter the incredibly rubbish solo buttons on the terrible Rock Band guitar, features a slide bar. This slide bar essentially has the five normal fret buttons, but as a single touch sensitive pad, which, according to the game, makes you look cool when you use it. If like me you don't have the World Tour guitar, and don't plan on getting it, fear not. The sections don't require the pad to be done, and you can simply tap using the normal five frets on both the Xplorer and Les Paul. These sections come up more often in Expert, and they certainly do help for a few parts, such as the Demolition Man intro and the Satch Boogie solo. However, the sections are usually quite small and I really don't have time to move my hand to tap, and then quickly bring it back to strum the next notes, I simply use one hand to hit these sections. It's a nice idea, but doesn't really work well, but it does make some parts easier I'll give it that.

Unfortunately, due to the massive backlash at the difficulty in Guitar Hero III (the main complaint being toward Expert difficulty and it's three note chords, personally, I think they can chart it as hard as they want to considering it's expert difficulty), Guitar has been massively toned down. Some times you play non-existent notes, others you don't play notes that should be there. The songs definitely aren't over-charted, but they still contain a fair amount of 3 button chords, but its expert difficulty so why not? In some cases, the songs can be under charted, Ramblin Man which features in both World Tour and Rock Band 2 is actually harder on Rock Band 2, providing a constant riff, making the song a little more difficult. Generally, the difficulty for some songs was perhaps too easy, and quite a lot of songs can be boring. It's fine if you're new to the series, but if you're a seasoned player, you may find yourself getting bored rather easily at most of the songs. It's a disappointment, personally I don't see why Expert difficulty can't have mad 3 button chord changes and the like, just because you could do Expert in the previous game doesn't mean you can in the next. Granted, there were a few silly parts in GH3, but for me it lasted much longer since I had to work my way up again. Inexperienced players will also welcome the Beginner difficulty, I think you only have to hold the buttons without strumming, but I've never tried it.

Next up is Bass. Unfortunately Guitar Hero World Tour has completely copied Rock Band, in which ALL songs are Bass. Remember in Guitar Hero II and III how some songs were bass, but if Rhythm guitar was in the track you could play that as well? I can assure you that Rhythm guitar is much more fun to play than Bass on pretty much all tracks. This was why Bass could get so dull in Rock Band; I seriously can't think why they would force you to play Bass all the time. Guitar Hero World Tour has also disabled Rhythm guitar, which is a shame, but Bass is slightly more exciting than what Rock Band has to offer. Guitar Hero World Tour introduces a whole new note for Bass. No, you don't need a special Bass guitar controller or anything, it's a whole new note that works on every guitar controller: the open bass note. A simple purple line that stretches across the fret board represents this new note. As the name suggests, the open bass note is where you simply strum, no fret buttons required. The timing window, from what I could tell, is exactly the same, and you even get HO/PO open bass notes (I guess you simply make sure you're not holding any frets to hit it, I'm not sure how they worked). This adds a whole new aspect to Bass, even for Guitar veterans. It really puts you off a first, but you'll soon get the hang of it. Nonetheless, it still makes the game much more fun since it's a new challenge, a bit like the HO/PO in Guitar Hero II (since they actually worked). They're not overused, but they're still present enough for you to adjust to using them, and although it's not much, it's a much better feature than a X6 multiplier. You'll find yourself enjoying Bass much more than in Rock Band (since there are a few good fun bass songs, B.Y.O.B. anyone?), but I would still prefer it if Rhythm was still available.

Next up are the drums. I'll start by saying I imported the US solus, meaning I used my Rock Band drums on the game. Firstly, YES THEY WORK on Guitar Hero World Tour. Yes, I know World Tour has 6 notes and Rock Band drums only have 5, but they simply took out the orange cymbal, it works fine. I will say it straight away: Rock Band has the better drums. No, I don't mean the actual instrument (I've never used the World Tour drums so I can't judge), but the charts and difficulty. I'll admit I hate the fact that the difficulty curve massively rises for Rock Band drums at the second to last tier (ie, Don't Fear the Reaper and Foreplay/Long Time), but they're much more realistic and fun to play than in World Tour. I approached World Tour with the intent to play Expert difficulty, and I did. The songs were pretty dull and easy at first, but they soon become tiresome, literally. If you've played Rock Band drums, imagine the main beat on Next to You. Yeah, it's incredibly fast and it aches your arms, fortunately it has pauses in it. Maybe my arm has become weaker, I don't know, but pretty much every song in World Tour had beats like this for the whole song and I just couldn't play for hours like with Rock Band. I got really tired really quick, my foot with the bass pedal was fine, and my right arm just ached too much, making the drums less enjoyable. The charts, for the most part, were fine and some songs are fun, I just didn't feel like I enjoyed the drums as much as Rock Band. For drum experts there are some solid drum songs towards the end (I did around 75% of required Career songs on Expert, but I had to do the last few on Hard). How do the drums work though?

There are many differences between the drums in World Tour, making it slightly more unique than Rock Band. First off, you can activate star power whenever you want. In Rock Band you relied on drum fills before you could activate it, but in World Tour, you can save it especially for when you're about to fail. This has some advantages, you can always activate it whenever the best parts come up, and as I said before, you can use it just before you fail in a hard part, rather than hoping for a Drum Fill to come up. However it's much harder to activate star power, you must hit both of the cymbals (or simply yellow and blue on the RB drums) to activate it. When you hit both, it occasionally doesn't register properly and you'll break your streak, it's happened to me a lot. Another problem is that although when star power does activate, you don't lose your multiplier but it cancels out any notes that are there when you activate it. Problem with this is, when playing a beat, I always went to try and increase my speed to activate star power, but hit the notes quick enough (ie, I tried to activate star power in-between two notes), and I always lost the beat or just messed up. This isn't exactly fault of the game, when you activate star power you can simply miss out the next note, but it does take a while to get used to. Other differences include notes that you have to hit extra hard to gain extra points (only on the World Tour drums since they're pressure sensitive), and sustained notes. Yeah, they confused me at first, sustained notes on drums? I was using the Rock Band drum set, and whenever I loaded the game up it insisted I use the World Tour drums for a better experience, but worse still, I wasn't allowed to do the tutorial. I tried keeping the stick on the pad, but as you can probably imagine it doesn't work. They don't pop up often so it took me a while to figure them out, but I finally did. Say the yellow pad is a sustained note; you simply keep hitting that pad, like a normal fill, just without all the notes. I'm not really sure why they put this in, you would probably get more notes if they simply placed the note over and over, but I guess it's easier to keep the sustained note than hitting a fill. Lastly, there are just normal free-style fills for you to play anything you want, shown by waves going across the high-way (where the notes are, it's called the high-way in the game now) where you can simply gain some extra points, almost like Rock Band's big rock endings. Drums are good fun, and they have some extra features, but I felt despite these shiny features I felt purely because of the charts and songs chosen, Rock Band had more enjoyable drums.

Lastly, we have the Vocals. Wow, these have been getting bad feedback People have mostly been complaining about the difficulty of vocals, or the fact that they're broken. People say the vocals in Rock Band were fun but easy, but I really struggle to do Medium. However, despite claims of harder difficulty, I can do the vocals on World Tour much better than in Rock Band. Granted I can't do expert, but I comfortably flew through Easy difficulty unlike Rock Band. I can see why people say the vocals are broken since I think I see how they work. Getting my headset ready, I took the tutorial, which explained it all rather well. Vocals are represented, rather unsurprisingly, the same as Rock Band. A little comet (which is always shown, which I rather liked) appears to the left to show your pitch, and then the different phases are words scroll (or you can choose static mode if you want). I sort of liked the way vocals were shown, it had nice little blue bars for the phases, and I just sort of preferred it to Rock Band. Red bars show talking parts, where pitch doesn't matter, and free style sections are shown by either waving hands (which simply gives you a bit of star power and puts your rock meter up a little), and waving sections (here, you just make noises, different tones puts up your multiplier for that section, and simply making noises to the song earns you points). Star Power is gained all the time, simply hitting the phases gets you star power, rather than relying on specific star power phases. Star Power is simply activated by pressing a button on the pad, another advantage over Rock Band considering pressing the A button just works. Apart from that it's essentially like Rock Band, match the pitch shown and keep hitting the phases, it's simple but it can be difficult at times.

Lastly, we have the music studio. I've tinkered with it, and even made a song (I only made it for the achievement though I admit). The Studio is pretty straightforward and has fairly simple to understand tutorials, but making a great song can be difficult. The idea is that you start recording, then playing the respective instrument, you just play and it records. You then put it into GHMix, where you essentially fix the song up and make it perfect. GHMix, for me at least, was very confusing so I didn't bother with it. When you start making a song, you can set an automatic drum and bass line so you don't have to bother with them if you want, and a BPM. It's a shame you can't change the BPM during the song, but you can change the Guitar scales and the guitar amp (i.e., the sound it makes), along with drums and bass. You can also edit rhythm guitar and keyboard, yes, keyboard. Nope it's not a new instrument; it's simply there for you to put in your track to spice it up a little bit. Once you've jammed, you can simply save it then upload it, but unless you've made something great barely anyone will download it. Unless you're really good at it, you'll probably have no incentive to keep creating songs, especially with the 3-minute limit and 1200-note limit. The downloaded songs aren't great too, but it isn't fault of the creator. They're just too limited and the sound quality isn't very good, they're all short and not very fun to play most of the time. However I did like it how the music studio automatically places HO/PO, star power, and difficulties for you, to relieve extra stress from you, since it does a good job at placing these for you (by difficulty I mean it simply creates easier charts for you). The music studio is a good idea, just not implemented well enough.

Unfortunately I can't write about the instruments (I haven't got or used them), so instead I'm going to talk about one of the most important aspects of the game: The set list. It's pretty mixed really. The majority of the songs in the game are pretty good, they sound great and they're all original recordings. They have some fairly big name artists on board and not too many bands you've never heard of (apart from a few European songs that you can't sing properly). I enjoyed most of the songs for the most part, but there will still a few duff songs, but I guess it's all just taste. The only problem with the set list is that a lot of the songs aren't really fun to play. Yeah, the songs themselves are a great, but you can have incredibly easy songs to play that are great to listen to. I just felt too many songs had pauses leaving you with nothing to do, and that some songs were just generally a bit boring to play. It's not a bad set list; it's just no Guitar Hero II where despite having a lot of rubbish songs, each song was fun to play.

The graphics in this game are definitely improved over Guitar Hero III and I love them. Whilst I think Rock Band is better on a technical level, I just prefer the whole game interface for the most part. I always prefer the gems to Rock Band's “Cuboids” as I like to call them, but the game interface has a few problems. Firstly, the menus are pretty hard to navigate at times. Trust me, choosing your own set list from the Quick Play menu (where every song is listed) is terrible. It's incredibly cramped and provides barely any information, to make it worse, you can't categorise the songs by difficulty, you can filter them via Career but it really doesn't reflect difficulty in the song. The game interface when you're playing a song has changed again, but maybe not for the best. When you're playing solo the interface is fine, but when you play as a band it's not so great. It's cramped just like Rock Bands, but it just isn't as easy to read. Your multiplier is incredibly hard to see, you can't see the star power properly unless you're on the left or doing vocals, and you generally can't see the score, the band multiplier or your rock meters, it's just a mess. Playing together is fun; it just isn't presented as well as Rock Band. Talking about actual graphics though, they're great. Guitar Hero World Tour has a more cartoon style to its graphics, the character models look alright (licensed characters look a bit odd though) and the venues, of which there are plenty, are pretty impressive. Animation is solid although personally it bugged me to see that the characters fingers on the guitar only touched the bottom few strings, but it doesn't really matter. I was quite impressed that during the tapping trill in Satch Boogie, the actual character went and tapped it, rather than just strumming. There's a lot of attention to detail in the game, such as the singer dancing like Michael Jackson during Beat It. You will notice it but it's never really important, the graphics don't need to be great but they are and I prefer them to Rock Band.

The ultimate question however, is Rock Band or Guitar Hero World Tour? Well personally, I would say buy Guitar Hero World Tour for it's instruments, and Rock Band 2 for the game. I think World Tour is great but I'll admit I'm getting a little bored fast. The music creator is pretty rubbish to be honest, and won't provide you with infinite songs. The interface isn't that great either, but overall it's a fun party game. It's great to play with friends when it's all working, and it's great to play solo as well. As long as you're blessed and given working instruments it's great fun while it lasts. However I simply can't write this without comparing the game to Rock Band 2. I've been playing Rock Band 2 for the past 2 weeks or so whilst writing this, and I have to say, I like it a little more than World Tour. I still recommend World Tour though, by all means go out and buy it, but you may also want to consider Rock Band 2, after all, that's what World Tour strives to be.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/05/08

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