Guitar Hero World Tour - Review
Guitar Hero is back, but this time, it has friends. That’s right, the Guitar Hero franchise has expanded, it’s no longer about shredding a plastic axe in your bedroom, now you and up to three friends can jam together as an entire band. But does it really work?
The basics of Guitar Hero are simple; coloured “gems” will scroll down the “highway” in sequence, you must hold down these colours on your guitar and strum when they reach the markers at the bottom, or if you’re playing the drums, simply hit the correctly coloured pad, no strumming needed.
The career mode in Guitar Hero World Tour differs greatly from all previous Guitar Hero games. In the past, you had to work through tiers of four songs and an encore before moving onto the next tier. In World Tour, you pick from a list of gigs, these have a varying number of songs to be performed along with an encore. The order in which gigs appear will vary depending on which instrument you are playing this means that you will have a fairly fresh experience with every instrument that you tackle.
There isn’t much of a story line with this one; you get a little animated cutscene at the start of career depicting your band member going from childhood to adulthood before being kicked out or leaving the band and taking a number for another band. These cutscenes are done with the same style and care as the ones seen in Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock and Guitar Hero: Aerosmith.
Onto the instruments, the new guitar has been crafted with amazing quality and a range of new features. Firstly, the strum bar has been made more like the one found on the Rock Band guitar controller, this means that the clicking isn’t so distracting, but it’s still there so that you know that your strum has registered. The neck of the guitar also features a “slide bar”, this is a row of touch sensitive frets in the same order as the main buttons, however, these can be used in a variety of ways such as bending notes or even strumming.
When playing the Guitar, you will have an almost identical experience to previous Guitar Hero games, aside from the fact that you will now sometimes get a chain of notes connected by a purple line. When these notes appear, you can use the slide bar to slide up and down to hit the notes, alternatively, you can just tap the buttons, but this doesn’t quite have the same feeling.
Hammer-ons and Pull-offs have been tweaked slightly to be more like Guitar Hero II’s mechanics. This means that they are harder than Guitar Hero III but aren’t quite as impossible as the first game.
There isn’t really much to say about the bass guitar apart from the addition of a sixth note. By that we mean not pressing a note at all and strumming an open string. This is represented by a purple bar stretching across all five frets.
Vocals are the first of two major new features in the game. Whilst it works quite well and can be quite fun, it’s nothing that we haven’t seen before in Singstar. Singing can be difficult if you don’t know a song or if you are generally tone deaf.
Singing works by measuring the pitch of your voice, it doesn’t matter how high or low it is, just the pitch, this means that females can sing songs performed by males or visa versa with relative ease. It’s hard not to laugh sometimes when your friends are singing and straining their voice to hit those high notes.
Star power is activated by tapping the top of the microphone, whilst this works quite well; you can accidentally activate it by making a popping sound with your mouth. This can be irritating if you were saving your star power for a difficult or high scoring moment.
Unfortunately for Karaoke enthusiasts, you can’t turn down the vocals of the song like in Rock Band, instead, you must go into the pause menu and then go to the sound set up, whilst it isn’t the end of the world, it would have been nice to allow you to do it without stopping the game.
Drums are possibly the biggest addition to the Guitar Hero franchise and on trying them out; they work much better than those found with Rock Band. By raising the cymbals and adding a fifth pad to the drum kit, you actually get a sense of playing real drums whereas Rock Band’s were more like a tabletop drum set.
Unfortunately the kit can be unresponsive and has a slight wireless lag, this isn’t such a problem when you become used to it, but it would have been nice to have a lag free, wired kit, do we really need wireless drums?
The wireless flaws bring me to my next point. When playing with a full band we have experienced two signal dropouts on both the guitar and drums. This lead to having to unplug and plug the dongle back in. The issue could be due to the fact that three dongles are required for the full band, this means that a lot of signals are being sent around and could easily cause confusion.
Graphics have been toned down this time around, instead of the over exaggerated characters we are used to, we are now left with realistic versions of their former selves, this is probably done to allow the created characters and guest musicians to fit in with the rest of the band, something that didn’t quite work with the previous game.
Whilst Guitar Hero III took the title of “Legends Of Rock”, it really is World Tour that deserves the title, with a heap of celebrity musicians from the past to the present, you now can fulfil your fantasies of rocking out with Ozzy at Ozzfest, one of the many gigs available in the career mode.
The soundtrack in World Tour is huge, featuring almost 100 songs you won’t struggle for a song to play. Best of all, every song is by the original artist, you can finally play without terrible cover versions ruining the experience. The addition of the song studio means that there will always be something new to play from GHTunes as well as the downloadable content which will hopefully flow out nicely. With luck, we could be seeing the occasional free content like with Legends Of Rock.
Unfortunately, a lot of the songs in the game seem to be for the more mature audience, by that I mean forty plus. Not that it doesn’t have modern songs, in fact the ones it does have are very good, it just seems that by attempting to expand the audience, Neversoft have forgotten who the game’s main audience is.
Multiplayer is where the game comes into its own. With a group of mates round, you really will have a lot of fun. You will always have a laugh when you hear someone singing “Beat it”, making the “Hee Hee” noises
A major issue with the multiplayer is that it lacks the recovery system found in Rock Band. You each have individual rock meters under the main one, but if one of you fails, that’s it, you have to restart, no bringing them back with star power. This can be quite stressful if you reach the end of the song and fail because the guitarist can’t do the solo, or the singer can’t handle the sudden pick up in pace or the drummer just plain loses co-ordination.
The song studio is rather difficult to use, by that, we don’t mean that it is bad, it just simply requires practice. In fact, it has about an hours worth of tutorials to get through, you can see the complexity. This can allow for some quite impressive songs, we can probably expect to see recreations of peoples’ favourite songs.
Despite its flaws, Guitar Hero world tour is possibly the most polished Guitar Hero to date. With the addition of being able to set up a set of songs on quick play for you to play straight through, instead of going back to the menu and the ability to change the difficulty from the pause menu, even mid-gig, this is one of the most pleasurable Guitar Hero experiences you can find.
8.5/10
