Review: Guitar Hero: World Tour Review, Mew To The Rock.

by Vince Lewin - January 8, 2009

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It’s hard to believe that the Guitar Hero franchise has only been around for 3 years given the popularity and the 9 iterations that already exist, but Activision no longer have it all their own way as their latest entry in the series goes toe-to-toe with former GH partner Harmonix’s Rock Band 2, and whilst Guitar Hero: World Tour offers features that will probably never appear in the Rock Band games.

More importantly it‘s a major leap forward from GH3 which was poorly received and perceived as being difficult just for the sake of it. In addition to the inclusion of drums and vocals, Neversoft have thankfully toned back the difficulty when compared to ‘Legends of Rock’, with only the truly insane parts (read BYOB and Satch Boogie) keeping the ridiculous level of difficulty.

The main thing that draws us into rhythm games is the song selection and if that particular selection appeals to us, and while there are some gems scattered amongst the 84 songs included on the disc there is also plenty of stinkers like ‘Monsoon’ and ‘What We’ve Done’. Of course musical taste is completely individual so these may appeal to you but for me it was the first of many stumbling blocks, especially as 13 of the better songs are also included in RB2 and a handful more are already available as DLC.

The career mode of World Tour is a falls somewhere between Rock Band 1 and 2, with each instrument having its own individual career mode in addition to a separate band career mode, but the old method of playing a selection of 5 songs in any order followed by an encore is gone, this is replaced by a selection of 3-5 song setlists each of which ends with a mystery encore. The setlists vary slightly dependant on which instrument you are playing in an attempt to make each list more difficult as you progress, but it doesn’t always seem that way.

Strangely there are a few setlists that you have to unlock using in game cash, like the Tool songs, but these songs do not count towards the completion of the game. Along the way in career mode you will encounter different rock stars, such as Travis Barker, Ozzy Osbourne & Jimi Hendrix, that are unlocked for use when you complete their song on specific instruments. Two of these also require you to win guitar duels, don’t worry though the flawed battle system from GH3 has been ditched for a straight ‘do better than the opponent’ approach.

In addition to a returning cast of the usual GH characters and the real life musicians, you can also create your own rock stars, even down to custom instruments! The clothing and guitar parts that are available are a lot less realistic when compared to Rock Band’s offerings, this can end up with you spending hours customising your character to get that perfect ‘spitting image’ look.

Now onto the actual game play, sadly GH:WT lacks the spark that Rock Band captures so well. This is down to shortfalls in a variety of areas, mostly caused by the badly implemented star power. When playing as a band you have a single shared star power meter that all players can fill and all players can draw from in short bursts, this means there is not much teamwork going on as
everyone looks out for themselves, and this is heightened by the fact you all share a single ‘life’ bar and if one of you fails then it is game over, as you cannot rescue the other players.

Whilst in single player mode once you fill the star power meter the next time you complete a star power sequence it will automatically activate your star power, this can be amazingly frustrating during the harder songs where you are trying to keep star power to use during the difficult solos, also the drummer has to hit 2 pads simultaneously to activate star power, which is impossible for a good 75% of most songs as you are far too busy playing along, especially on the higher difficulties.

The game does not come without some innovations though, as the bassist will now find themselves faced with purple bar notes in the same way the drummer does for the bass pedal, these indicate ‘open notes’ and involve strumming without pressing any buttons, something that is so much more difficult than it sounds in the middle of a frantic string of notes.

Graphically GH:WT falls well short of Rock Band 2, everything is just rendered with a little less quality, the facial expressions look ridiculous and the on stage animations are quite lacklustre. The note stream animation seems have been taken straight from GH3, even down to the little flame animation when you hit a note. Thankfully the pop-ups that tell you when you hit a landmark point in your streak or to tell you your star power is ready for use have been massively scaled down, meaning it no longer draws you attention away from the note charts.

The single biggest disappointment in GH:WT for me was the fact the Neversoft have done nothing to stop what I call ‘guitar hero vision’, where after an extended session of GH you get the sensation that everything is scrolling towards you. This is caused by the patterned backgrounds on the necks in the note charts, and was solved in Rock Band by making them solid translucent black.

The one thing that this game has that Rock Band doesn’t is the built in music studio, dubbed ‘GHTunes’ in game, that allows you to make songs from scratch using the samples already built into the game. Sadly, unless you are very musically orientated you will only ever be able to make something that sounds like it was made on the SNES, but it’s fun never the less and you really can produce some amazing results if you have the talent.

You can upload your own tracks for the rest of the world to hear as well as downloading other peoples, these range from bad to excellent with the odd cover like ‘Never Gonna Give you up’ appearing until Activision pull it for copyright infringement. However, just like the rest of World Tour ‘GHTunes’ is not without its flaws. Your songs are not allowed to be more than 3 minutes in length and cannot contain any vocals, which somewhat ruins the idea, but it is a good starting block for future versions of the game.

Overall GH:WT is a wasted opportunity by Activision, they had the chance to learn from the strengths and shortcomings of Rock Band and produce the ultimate band experience. Instead what you get is a flat, lifeless experience that only the drummer and guitarist can really enjoy, the vocals come out like a bad night at a karaoke bar and the bass is just too easy in comparison to the rest of the game.

If you want the best multiplayer musical experience out there, go buy Rock Band 2, if you’re fed up with RB2 then World Tour makes a welcome change but is certainly no replacement.