Guitar Hero World Tour (PS3) Review

Posted by Armando Rodriguez on 11.08.2008

Guitar Hero goes the way of Rock Band and provides a good (but flawed) experience.



It was a matter of when and not if. As soon as Rock Band introduced full band play, Guitar Hero had to follow suit. Although is kind of weird to call a full band game “Guitar” Hero, Guitar Hero World Tour is just that, a full band game from the people at Red Octane and Activision. Is the game any good? Well, it depends on your definition of good. It is indeed, a good game. But is it Rock Band good? That’s another matter entirely.



Gameplay:

If you are not familiar with Guitar Hero gameplay at this point, you have been living under a rock for several years now. Guitars and Bass work the same way they have always done, five fret buttons that represent the five colors scrolling on screen. Hold down a fret and hit the strum just as the note hits the right spot to play it. The “whammy” bar is back and allows you to distort extended notes for bonus points and added star power. Bass gets a new addition in the form of an open note, a purple line that scrolls down and to play it, you just need to strum without using any frets. It’s a small addition, but one real bass players will appreciate. Guitar also gets a new addition in the form of the “touch strip”. Located underneath the fret buttons area of the neck of the guitar, the strip has two functions: Allow you to play slide sections and work as a “Wah” effect during extended notes. It’s too bad that this function does not work as intended. Slide sections are indentified by a purple rope encircling the notes. Move your hand down to the slide and you can play them by sliding your fingers up and down the slide. However, the strip is way too sensitive, which will make getting a perfect run during a slide section almost impossible. The “wah” effect works the same way as the whammy bar does: It allows you to modify extended notes, but with a different type of distortion. This is also very tricky, since you need to keep the fret button pushed and move your right hand up and down the strip to cause the desired effect. Due to the placement of the touch strip and the fact that you need to move your “strum” hand to the strip, it gets pretty useless on hard difficulty and above when things are harder and notes fall down quicker. The whammy bar is better placed and has a similar function anyway. Another minor guitar addition is that you can activate star power by pushing a button (on the new guitar) if you don’t like to tilt it while you play. If you don’t spend the extra cash on the new guitar, the Guitar Hero 3 guitar works just fine. You can play the slide sections by doing hammer-ons and pull-offs. The new guitar looks really sleek, but with its two new features not working as intended, spending the extra cash is not really worth it.


The new guitar looks sleek, but it's new features don't work as well as intended.

The big addition to the gameplay is drums and vocals. The drum kit, in my opinion, works better than the standard Rock Band kit because the cymbals are placed higher than the rest of the pads and it just feels more natural. The kit has a snare (red), two toms (blue and green) and the two cymbals (orange and yellow), in addition to the kick pedal, which is represented on-screen by the same purple line used to represent the open notes on bass guitar. The big difference is that you might need to hit the kick pedal and another note (or notes) at the same time, represented by the notes appearing on top of the purple line. To activate star power on the drums, you need to hit both cymbals at once. There is no “fill in” time like in Rock Band 2 when you activate star power, which means that you might miss several notes after you activate it if you are not quick enough. This situation gets a lot of complaint from gamers, but I believe it feels more realistic since you need to activate star power on situations when you actually need to hit one (or both) cymbals instead of at any random time. However, you need to hit the cymbals significantly harder to activate star power, which combined with the sensitivity issues (more on that in a sec) will make your life difficult more than once. I found myself sometimes hitting both pads and not activating star power because I did not do it hard enough. In addition to this features, there are also “accent” notes. These notes are represented by two white arrows on top of the note and by hitting them harder you get bonus points. You can also add your own drum fills on several songs.

Early reports, however, show a multitude of sensitivity issues and broken kits. I have not experienced anything drastic like pads that don’t work, but in several random instances I am forced to hit the pads harder than usual because they won’t detect the notes I am playing. Like I said, it seemingly happens at random. It seems the culprit of this is the material used on the construction of the drums. They where made more bouncy in order to make them feel more realistic (in this aspect they succeed) but it seems to have had an adverse effect on the gameplay.

As far as vocals, they are the same thing we have seen in games like Karaoke Revolution and Singstar. The notes scroll on screen (they can also be set to static if you prefer) and the singer needs to match the corresponding pitch line to succeed. Star power is activated by tapping the microphone (pretty hard) with your hands. To earn star power, you need to match the pitch on the notes whose lines are red instead of the usual blue. There are also sections in which you can say whatever you want, although I have noticed that by altering the pitch of your voice a multitude of times you get more points than by just talking through them. The microphone bundled with the game in the full band kit is wired, which I think is inexcusable. The line is pretty long, but it makes it hard for really emotive singers (like my neighbor on Livin’ with a Prayer) to jump around and have fun. Plus, the microphone looks the same as any other video game microphone since the Playstation 2 days. As a matter of fact, I still have my Karaoke Revolution 3 microphone and side by side they look just the same.

Thankfully, the game is still very fun on both, full band and single player. I think this game has a better single player mode than Rock Band since every instrument has its own separate career mode and unlockables. The full band career is also fun; although I disliked that the game considers two players a full band. Yes, with two players you can play the same career mode as with a full band. However, the career aspect shows how little World Tour has truly evolved from the guitar-only games. You select from a number of gigs, each with a pre-determined set of songs. You beat the gig, play an encore, pick another gig and move on. It is basically the same system from the other games in which you picked a tier, play the songs in that tier to unlock another and so on. Only one gig that you unlock later on allows you to create your own set list and play it to earn money, but it is too little, too late.



As far as band creation and customizing options, they are very limited as well. For your band, you can change the name, select from a bunch of pre-designed logos (or make your own) and that’s it. No staff hiring or anything. Also every player can “create” his own band and you will always be playing in the band leader’s band. It feels very underdeveloped and tacked on, not like a full feature. The same thing happens with the create your own rocker feature. Although I appreciate the “Tiger Woods” like slider system to adjust face dimensions and such, the amount of costumes you can unlock is pretty limited and there is no option to change colors. You can also create your own instrument which is a nice feature I would like to see expanded in future games.

As far as the soundtrack is concerned, it offers a lot of variety. Sometimes too much variety. You will probably like a bunch of songs and hate another, but with the diversity of bands and genres, that was expected. Big name bands and artists like Ozzy Osbourne, Metallica, Sting, Korn, Linkin Park, Michael Jackson, Survivor and Paramore are part of the set list, but I feel like it is still missing something. A lot of big name bands that where in Guitar Hero 3 are missing here, like Guns N’ Roses, Iron Maiden, Aerosmith, Rolling Stones and Rage Against the Machine. Also, I like “Trapped Under Ice”, but I can think about 10 better Metallica songs to be in the game. Blame Guitar Hero: Metallica for that. As far as famous rockers goes, Guitar Hero World Tour features a bunch of them. Through your career you can play as and unlock the likes of Ted Nugent, Sting, Billy Corgan, Zakk Wylde, Ozzy Osborne, Travis Barker and Jimi Hendrix among others. Many of them can only be unlocked through the single player career, which is a bummer, but does add a level of single player depth that Rock Band lacks. At least with World Tour there is a reason to play alone.


Sting is one of a handful of real life artists you can unlock

Guitar Battles also make a return appearance and work better here, since they removed the lame string breaking power-ups.

However, the big new feature is the song creator studio. If I could describe it in one phrase it would be “Big Letdown”. The songs you can create sound really bad, like midi or ringtones, something you could do with the Mario Paint game in Super Nintendo. That is, if you actually get around to making a song because the system is so poor, thanks to hideous control decisions, that most people will try it once and the forget about it. Just try controlling everything with a fake plastic guitar instead of a controller and you will quickly realize that menu management is a real hassle. It also doesn’t help that the instruments have very noticeable lag: A friend of mine is a real life drummer and he quickly pointed out that he would hit the pads and they would take a full second or so to register, which made it difficult for him to “jam” on it. It would have worked better if people could just assign sounds to buttons on the controller and create their own note charts that way. As it is, I bet that 99% of World Tour players will never touch the studio again and will just download tracks from whoever makes them. The GH Tunes area works well and there are some cool tunes to download. Or midi versions of cool tunes, but you get the idea.

I think this was expected, but in case you where hoping for the Guitar Hero 3 downloadable content to be compatible with World Tour, you will be disappointed. Outside of the recently released Death Magnetic album, none of the previous game’s DLC’s work with World Tour.

As far as the difficulty goes, it is still harder than Rock Band, but easier than previous Guitar Hero installments. I still have not gotten 5 stars on medium difficulty on every song in Guitar Hero 3, but did it with very little problem in World Tour. Outside of a few tricky songs like Pull Me Under and Satch Boogie, most of them where a piece of cake. I guess this makes the game more accessible, but not so much so that it will turn off Guitar Hero vets.

Graphics:

The graphics are very similar to previous installments. The band members still look a bit cartoonish when compared to Rock Band, but they look better than they did on GH3. The animation is also better, especially the drummer, which finally looks alive and not robotic. The band looks more alive and full of energy and the avatars of the famous rockers look fantastic. If you don’t smile when Jimi Hendrix walks out and waves your singer away, you have no soul. It is easy to indentify the different notes, but this game begs for a High Def- TV. On standard definition, especially on smaller TV sets, it is almost impossible for the singer to read his lines unless he is close to the screen. The screen is also very cluttered when a full band is playing, so a big TV is ideal to maximize your experience with the game.

Sound:

The soundtrack is composed of master tracks, no lame covers this time around, which is a plus. Even the live songs sound good. Sound effects, however, are starting to show their age, especially the lame sound that plays whenever you miss a note. It has been the same for the entire series. Crowd noise is well done and makes you feel like you are a real band playing a concert.

Controls:

If your kit is working properly, the controls are great. However, with the many complaints of broken kits and bad sensitivity (especially the drums), it is likely that you will experience some control hiccups.

The touch strip in the guitar is almost impossible to master due to how sensitive it is. Like I said before, the “wah” effect gets useless on harder difficulties due to the awkward placement of the strip. The new “Star Power” button in the new guitar works fine….until you realize that it has been placed between the “select” and “start” buttons and it is very easy (and annoying) to pause the game by mistake when trying to activate star power. So tilting is still the preferred method. Everything else works as well as it did on previous installments. Its funny that everything old works ok and the heavily touted new features are the control’s sore spot.

Drums have the sensitivity issues described in the gameplay section. The only thing that seems to be flawless is the vocals, although a button in the base of the microphone would have been better than slapping the microphone to activate star power.

Outside of the “new” guitar features, the rest of the control’s problems come from defective kits, so chances are that if your kit is one of the few “flawless” ones, your experience with them will be a lot better than mine.

Replayability:

It’s Guitar Hero, which means it has plenty of replay value. The incentive to play the single player mode with all the instruments to unlock the “real” rock stars adds a layer of single player depth that Rock Band is lacking. Playing in full band mode is awesomely fun, but the lack of a “no fail” mode and Guitar Hero’s trademark punishing difficulty might scare the less rhythmically inclined. This is the type of game that you can play everyday and never get bored.

The 411:

So? Which is the better game, Rock Band 2 or Guitar Hero World Tour? I guess it depends. I have praised Guitar Hero’s better single player mode and the fact that the band play is as good as in Rock Band might lean the balance towards Guitar Hero. But at the same time Rock Band feels like a more polished product. Rock Band’s create-a-band and create-a-rocker feature work better than Guitar Hero’s and Rock Band’s Band Career is also more interesting. However, Guitar Hero is the more challenging game that gives die-hards that thrill of beating a song on expert difficulty. So in-spite of being in the same market, they can appeal to a whole different crowd. I still give the edge to Rock Band 2, but World Tour is a very good game on its own right.

Graphics	8.5	Better than Guitar Hero 3 and on par with competing products in the same market.
Gameplay	7.5	Provides a good band experience and deep single player mode, but the progression structure is unchanged from previous installments and the customizing features are not as attractive as Rock Band.Most of the new features don't work as they should.
Sound	8.5	Master tracks and good crowd noise make up for the repetitive sound effects.
Lasting Appeal	8.0	With a deep single player career and fun band play, Guitar Hero will last you a long time. Downloadable content will help extend replay value.
Fun Factor	8.0	In-spite of control hiccups and the antiquated progression structure, World Tour retains most of the qualities that make the franchise great.
Overall	8.0   [ Very Good ]

Screenshots
All 8 Guitar Hero: World Tour Screenshots