GameSpy Review of Guitar Hero World Tour

Where do you even begin to review a massive game like Guitar Hero World Tour? While it carries the popular series' name, it could arguably be considered a total reboot for the franchise, adding new instruments and controllers, multiple campaigns, significant gameplay additions and even a studio for creating original songs. And while the result occasionally feels a little rushed or unpolished, Guitar Hero World Tour largely succeeds in offering a game you could easily lose yourself in for months, whether you're playing as part of a band or as a solo act.





Pressing the Action





By now, you probably know the history. Using special guitar-shaped controllers, the Guitar Hero games have allowed you to play along with rock classics by mashing buttons in time with notes scrolling down the screen. For Guitar Hero World Tour the formula expands to a four-piece band, including guitar, bass, drums and vocals, with varying campaigns for solo and band careers.





If this all sounds a lot like Rock Band, well, duh. From the broadest perspective, the two games are essentially doing the same thing, no matter what Activision executives might try and tell you. But this isn't a bad thing, because the formula works. So what ultimately makes Guitar Hero World Tour better, worse or just plain different than Rock Band are the little things.





That starts with the guitar portion of GHWT, which boasts several significant tweaks as well as a new wireless guitar controller. The new axe (which closely resembles a Schecter Hellraiser) is essentially the same as the GH3 Les Paul, with a slightly longer strum bar, longer whammy bar, and Back button designed to look like a guitar bridge, that you can rest your palm on to activate Star Power. It's a little heavier than the Les Paul, and a new connector has been added to lock the detachable neck into place, which was the cause of some complaints in GH3.










The biggest addition, however, is a touch-sensitive strip located in the middle of the guitar's neck. There are a number of things you can do with the strip: If you tap it during normal phrases, you can use it to strum. If you slide your hand across it during sustained notes, it'll create a little flange effect and can also build up Star Power just like using the whammy bar. And during solos, you'll now notice that some phrases have transparent notes connected by a purple "rope"; these notes don't need to be strummed whatsoever, and can be played by sliding your finger along the touch strip. It might sound gimmicky, but in practice, there's actually a lot of fun stuff you can do with the strip.





In fact, the transparent "tap" notes might be the single biggest innovation to hit the Guitar Hero series in years. The biggest complaint lodged at Guitar Hero III was that it was too difficult, that players would hit a wall at songs like "Raining Blood" and give up. But with the tap notes, players now have a way to fudge their way through the tougher solos. And even if you're not using the new guitar, the touch strip is never mandatory; you can play through the entire game with a Les Paul if you're so inclined, and you'll still find the new tap sections easier since the notes never need to be strummed.





Wisely, the poorly balanced boss battles from GH3 have been replaced by guitar "duels" with Zakk Wylde and Ted Nugent. (The Nuge's entrance is epic.) Here, there are no power-ups to trade back and forth; you just play through the entire song and try to stay ahead of your counterpart. If nothing else, you can breeze through these duels without much trouble, and they won't hinder your progress in any way.





Bassists haven't been forgotten in GHWT, either. The biggest addition here is a sixth "open" note, represented by a solid purple bar across the fretboard. When these notes come up, you strum as usual, just without holding down any fret buttons. It's so simple, it's amazing to think no one's done it sooner. And the bass campaign really needs the additional flavor, because its charts are far simpler than its guitar counterpart's. So on songs like "Mr. Crowley" or "Assassin," the open note should at least keep bassists awake.





Sadly, we're already seeing numerous reports of technical issues with the new guitar. Some people have reported problems with the touch strip (which, by the way, can be disabled from the options menu). There have also been several different complaints about the strum bar, which we've had firsthand experience with: The bundle we picked up at our local Best Buy had a guitar that acted like we were pressing the green button every time we strummed, rendering the guitar useless. As hard as it might be, you really might want to wait a few days to see how widespread the hardware issues might be before dropping some serious cash on a bundle.



















For Guitar Hero World Tour, two new instruments make their series debut: vocals and drums. While the GHWT microphone is basically a rebranded version of the Logitech-created mic used for the Rock Band games, the new GHWT drum kit is anything but.





The new GHWT drums feature five pads and a kick pedal, upping the ante somewhat from Rock Band's four-pad kit. Here, you have three toms at waist level, and two cymbals sitting on an upper tier. The yellow (left) cymbal acts as a hi-hat, while the orange (right) cymbal acts as a ride or crash (to activate Star Power, you hit both cymbals together at any time), with the red tom acting as a snare and the blue and green pads acting as toms. Without question there's a learning curve for the kit, especially when you need to do rolls with the blue and green pads, as well as getting a feel for jumping between the cymbals and lower pads without getting sticks caught all over the place.





But there's no question that the GHWT drum kit is miles ahead of its Rock Band counterparts. Everything is quieter, bouncier, and generally more responsive. There have been no issues with dropped notes in fast snare rolls or crosstalk or worrying about hitting the pads just right. The kick pedal is probably the weak point of the kit -- it can be awkward trying to do fast double-kicks in harder songs -- but we're looking forward to spending a lot more time with the drums. The only real drawback is that the kit isn't all that adjustable, as we'd love to change the orientation of the pads to make it friendlier to use with Rock Band.





Shout It Out Loud





As with a lot of Guitar Hero World Tour's elements, the vocals look a lot like Rock Band's at first glance, but feature some significant changes below the surface. The general concept is the same as in singing games going back to Karaoke Revolution: There's a horizontal strip which shows the lyrics scrolling across, and a pitch meter that you need to sing in tune with. The better you sing, the more points you rack up. You're basically graded per phrase, and if you sing well enough, you'll start to build a streak that results in a score multiplier bonus, shown at the right of the screen.










Then there's the smaller stuff: You'll occasionally see special sections in red that you can just rap or talk your way through, which are basically freebies, and nothing like the broken talkies from the first Rock Band. There are also optional freestyle sections where you can sing whatever you want for extra points, which sort of take the place of Rock Band's percussion fills. You also have the option of activating Star Power at any time, instead of waiting for special activation windows.





But the biggest differences between the games will likely only be noticed by hardcore singers. For some reason, there's no meter that shows you how well you're doing mid-phrase; you simply sing each phrase and hope the score multiplier doesn't reset, which is a bizarre design decision. It might have something to do with the instrument's scoring system, where you only need about 85% on a phrase to keep a streak intact, meaning you can have what would look like a perfect run in Rock Band but end up with something like a paltry 89%. (At the end of a song, there's a stats screen that breaks down every phrase by percentage hit, which is pretty cool.)





What it means is that while the two games will likely feel identical for casual vocalists, the scoring system should provide an extra level of challenge for uber-singers, where getting 100% on a single song should prove to be a major accomplishment. This is as opposed to Rock Band 2, where a handful of players (including this writer) already have 100% on the entire 84-song setlist. That won't be happening in Guitar Hero World Tour anytime soon.



















All of these instruments (even bass!) have their own individual campaigns associated with them, which can be played on any difficulty. A new difficulty, Beginner, has been added, where you basically just strum in time with the notes without holding down any fret buttons. For the campaigns, the game's 80+ songs are organized into gigs of three to six songs apiece. You have some freedom in what order you play everything, but in general, you have to play most of the early gigs in order to keep unlocking later ones.





While this presentation is fairly vanilla, barely a notch above a linear campaign, there are a few highlights along the way. You're usually shown the first few songs of a gig and then given an encore to complete the show. Often, these encores feature guest-stars mo-capped into the game, including Billy Corgan, Hayley Williams, Sting, Ozzy Osbourne and others. Each of the gigs takes place in a different city, and while few of the early locales stand out in any way, the final two are fairly memorable.





Outside of the Career mode, the other main way to play offline is through the usual Quickplay menu, which, to be blunt, is a complete embarrassment. Guitar Hero III had a fairly organized setlist, able to toggle between the main setlist, bonus songs and DLC and show persistent high scores and ratings for each. Guitar Hero World Tour takes a step backwards by reverting to one bloated, tedious-to-navigate list, one that doesn't show scores or ratings until you highlight specific tracks. There are three sort options -- artist, song and career (which is apparently GHWT code for "difficulty") -- but for some inexplicable reason the current sorting isn't shown. And to top it all off, the list is just ugly, with every song showing up as a different size depending on the title. Considering this will be one of the most commonly used screens in the game, it's completely baffling.










Happy Together





Presentation aside, the solo campaigns in Guitar Hero World Tour could be considered as entertaining as anything in the Rock Band games. In fact, due to the game's more forgiving note windows and superior hardware, it's easy to imagine many people preferring GHWT, at least for solo play. But once you elevate to a three- or four-piece band, GHWT often feels very much like a first effort.





The biggest stumbling block, by far, is the interface. Somehow, GHWT takes the familiar layout used by Rock Band -- vocals across the top of the screen and the three other instruments split across the bottom -- and turns it into something almost unintelligible. Where does Star Power go? How do you know when someone is failing? How do streaks work? Even after repeated explanations, our team of Rock Band veterans were lost. Someone would fail out and everyone would look at each other, wondering, "What just happened?"





As it turns out, most of the important info is located in the upper left in the screen. There's a shared pool of Star Power that everyone draws from, and a Rock Meter for each player as well as the entire band. Unfortunately, that's not really a useful place for that info if you're playing in the center or bottom-right; it's not a big deal if you're playing on Medium, but if you're playing on Hard or Expert and your focus is locked on your particular note chart it's easy to miss that info completely. In our playtesting, if we didn't yell out at people to use Star Power, they'd often forget that they had it at all.





And really, there's not a whole lot of interesting stuff for a band to do. Rock Band's World Tour offered more gigs than most bands could ever complete, tied into a fan-acquisition meta-game, and Rock Band 2 added things like "Battle of the Bands" events and Tour Challenges. There's almost none of that in GHWT. You can play through the Career, but there's not much difference between that and doing Quickplay setlists. Playing as a band is certainly fun, but it would be nice to see it incorporated into something more ambitious.

















It's hard to imagine we're this far into a Guitar Hero review without talking about the actual music. After all, you can have all the features in the world and it won't mean anything if you've got a terrible setlist.





Fortunately, that's not the case with Guitar Hero World Tour. We've now reached a point where all 86 songs are master tracks, so we're not subjected to any horrible cover versions. The setlist isn't exactly overloaded with blockbuster hits, but it does have its share, like "Hotel California," "Rebel Yell," "Crazy Train," and "Hot for Teacher." There's also a considerable amount of big-name overlap with the Rock Band games, from "Today" to "Everlong" to "Eye of the Tiger," and so the GHWT setlist turns out to be pretty strong.





On the other end, GHWT contain a half-dozen live tracks and a few foreign-language songs, which turn out to be among the weaker songs in the game. ("On the Road Again"? Really?) It feels a little weird to have unknown songs like "Esculela de Calor" and "Nuvole E Lenzuolaas" part of the main tracklist while popular songs like "Jessie's Girl" and "Hot Blooded" are being offered as launch-week DLC, but those are exceptions and not the rule.





In terms of difficulty, it seems Neversoft has heeded the complaints of fans who thought GH3 was way too hard. There are definitely some challenging songs -- the tapping section in the middle of "Satch Boogie" is epic -- but the shred factor has definitely been turned way down for GHWT. That crowd will likely need to turn to DLC for its fix, as Metallica's "Death Magnetic" is already available as a full download, and there's the promise of more regular DLC to come this year.










Encore Performances





Of course, competitive and online play has become a huge part of the Guitar Hero games, and both are ever-present in GHWT. There are the familiar Face-Off and Pro Face-Off modes, and the lesser-played Battle Mode also makes its return. But the biggest headline is the ability to play competitive multiplayer against other bands, whether it's a 2v2 match or a full 4v4 matchup, something the Rock Band series has yet to offer. Of course, you don't see the other band's note charts on your screen (considering GHWT's interface issues, we can only imagine what a disaster that would be), but it's a cool feature we're looking forward to playing more of as we inevitably get into online bands.





Guitar Hero World Tour also trumps Rock Band in its character-customization system, which allows a great deal of flexibility in shaping your on-screen character. If anything, it's not far off from the EA "Game Face" systems, where you have control over every last detail like eye placement, bone structure and lip fullness. There are some things you can't do -- why do these rockstar games offer such limited hairstyle options? -- but just the fact that you can build your own custom guitars is a huge win. And if none of the character customization appeals to you, all of your favorite GH characters -- Axel Steel, Casey Lynch, etc. -- are available for you to play as.





Finally, the last piece of the GHWT puzzle is the Music Studio, which allows you to create your own songs and upload them to the new "GHTunes" site for the rest of the Internet to download for free and play in-game. We won't spend a lot of time on this here -- check out our massive look at the studio from a few days ago if you're dying for every last detail -- but the bottom line is that though it's impressive what kind of tools Neversoft has crammed into a videogame, it's still both limited and awkward to navigate with a guitar controller. We expect a handful of players will become proficient at the studio and create some memorable tunes, but we're not expecting any kind of free DLC windfall from it.





The Final Word





Guitar Hero World Tour is often both exhilarating and frustrating. There's no question it's a great game: It's got the music, the gameplay, and superior hardware (assuming you don't get a bad guitar, of course). We have no doubt that we'll spend months chasing high scores across all four instruments, as well as plenty of time playing online. We might even spend some time building our own rock stars or creating custom songs. But as a band game, the unpolished, unintuitive feel of the interface may likely send many players back to Rock Band as their party game of choice. Now that Guitar Hero World Tour has delivered its opening number, we'll have to see if it can deliver a superior encore.

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