It was bound to happen: once Harmonix and MTV Games released “Rock Band”, there was only one direction that Activision, Neversoft, and RedOctane could go with the “Guitar Hero” series if they wanted to keep up, and that was to expand the game into a full band. “Guitar Hero World Tour”, which culminates the previous work on “Guitar Hero” with a separate “Drum Hero” project that by Activision, seems like a no-brainer, and ought to gain the benefit of Activision’s big-money backing.
I say “seems like”, because while “World Tour” feels exactly like how I’d expect the Neversoft/Activision product to come out, the game has its missteps that make it miss the mark of being anywhere close to the success and enjoyment of “Rock Band”. It’s not a terrible title, and music game fans can’t go wrong with it, but if your place is already getting filled with plastic instruments, the choice between the two series is definitely weighted in Rock Band’s favor.
“World Tour” provides two basic Career modes, one for the single player for each of the four instruments (lead guitar, bass, drums, and vocals), and then a Band Career that requires at least two players (one may be remote) to continue. Unlike “Rock Band”, you aren’t missing much if you can’t do Band Career. That’s because the solo and band versions are set up the same, as a series of predetermined gigs consisting of two to six songs at various arenas. Completing a gig successfully earns you cash and will help unlock other, more difficult gigs. Effectively, it’s an alternate approach to the old career paths of the past “Guitar Hero” games, with the biggest change being that you have two or more gigs always awaiting you. It helps make the game a bit more fluid — for example, you can skip a gig to try more difficult ones, instead of getting stuck at a wall that you can’t pass. It also helps that you can change your difficulty level at any time so that if a setlist is killing you, you can drop back a notch and keep progressing. However, when you compare this mode to Rock Band’s World Tour mode, it is pale imitation that lacks any depth.
In addition to money, you earn rewards to help customize your characters — but here’s another place where the game tries to make improvements that miss the boat. You do have super-fine control over how your character’s face looks, as the game borrows from Neversoft’s Tony Hawk series to give you dozens of options to get the face right. But when it comes to virtual dress-up, the number of outfits are limited, at least when compared to the choices “Rock Band” offers, making it feel like you only have half-a-dozen options for what you want your character to look like. Of course, you can always go with the other “Guitar Hero” avatars brought in from the other games, and as you play along, you’ll have the chance to unlock avatars of artists like Billy Corgan, Sting, or Jimi Hendrix, but for obvious reasons, you can’t customize these guys. You can also trick out your instrument to a high degree, which is likely because Gibson Guitars has had a falling out with the series and no name brands in the guitar business are available. Mind you, the graphic quality of the characters are similar to “Guitar Hero III”, which, well, is something of personal taste to appreciate or not.
“World Tour” has learned from its past mistakes. The interface, for example, definitely looks and plays better. The major change is that they’ve moved the multiplier indicator to the right of the track and put the Rock meter/Star Power on the left. This makes it easier to keep track of your performance and note streaks. The game still announces note streaks, but instead of appearing over the note track, it is now in a smaller font and above, making it much less obtrusive.
As for the new instruments, the new guitar features a touchpad on the neck (about the same location as the 5 smaller keys on the Rock Band guitar). You can opt to use this pad to play notes by tapping it while fingering on the normal frets, but what makes the pad useful is on certain series of fast notes that are connected by a faint purple line; these notes you can slide your finger on the touch pad to play, or simply finger the right frets on the “World Tour” guitar. (For other guitar controllers, you only have the choice of fingering the frets without strumming). For some songs, this is imperative to use (the intro to “Demolition Man” for example) while other songs use it when there really is sliding notes, but in the long run, it is a rather limited feature. The new controller also has the Star Power button directly below the strum bar where it sits at the base of your wrist, meaning that instead of the usual method of tilting the controller up to activate it, you can press your wrist in and launch, a nice feature particularly on the more note-heavy songs. The strum bar is still a bit loud (particularly compared to the “Rock Band 2″ guitar) but easy to use. Overall, I’ve no major complaints on the guitar — it works nicely, but it is not needed to really enjoy the game. Besides the sliding notes, the guitarists will also see hammer-ons that occur during sustained notes, which work similar to normal hammer-ons, save that you have to keep your fingers on the sustain notes while you play the others. It’s a bit tricky at first, but it makes perfect sense in the songs that use it. The other new twist is for the bassist, who is given open slap notes that require strumming without hitting fret buttons. If you’ve been playing the “Guitar Hero” games for a while, it will take a bit to ween yourself off thinking you need to hold down a fret before you can strum, but once you get the trick, it can make the bass lines for some of the songs more interesting.
A brief departure into difficulty: I consider myself a “Hard” “Guitar Hero” player — I can complete most songs on “Hard” in GH2 and GH3, and some early songs on “Expert” but there are walls I cannot pass. On the other hand, I’m one “Green Grass and High Tides” away from completing “Expert” mode in “Rock Band”, and have a handful of songs in the sequel I just can’t do. I only outline these to explain that when I first started the lead guitar career on “World Tour”, I started at hard but quickly had to change up to “Expert” finding that all but three to five songs were just that easy. If you are looking for your wall o’ notes in “World Tour” you might as well keep looking, because it is just not there. They made it easy by selecting songs that are friendly to all the instrument players, not just guitar, so they omitted solid guitar solos. Personally, I’m glad it is easier, but I know people who will be disappointed to find no major challenges. The bass career is also pitifully easy until the very last tier, and that’s only because it’s annoying-fast songs like “B.Y.O.B.” with tons of repeating notes. Basically, with “World Tour”, the difficulty is now on par with that of “Rock Band 2″, if maybe a notch under. This means it can be good for the more casual gamers but not for those that are l33t. Also, the lead guitarist will find a few boss battles on original compositions from Zakk Wylde and Ted Nugent, but thankfully these aren’t the power-up-fests of “Guitar Hero III”, but more a tug-of-war using a call-and-response system. They are both easily cleared but are a nice change of pace.
The drum set with “World Tour” has five pads compared to Rock Band’s four, so normally the track is presented with five notes plus bass, but when you plug in “Rock Band” drums, two tracks merge to one. As there is a lot of song crossover between “World Tour” and “Rock Band”, I can pretty much assume that the note tracking between the two games is very comparable at the Hard level. Unfortunately, one feature, “armored” notes that utilize the velocity-sensitive pads of the “World Tour” controller, cannot be seen playing on either “Rock Band” drum controller, but judging from what I’ve seen, it is the one twist like the sustained hammer-ons that seems to make sense without diverging too much from the core game. Unlike “Rock Band”, Star Power on “World Tour” is activated by striking the two cymbal pads (the elevated ones on the “World Tour” kit, and the two center ones on the “Rock Band” side) at the same time, instead of waiting for a riff. Those that have played “Rock Band” on drums and are trying to rescue a failed player know exactly what I mean when I say this is generally an improvement. However, it is also a problem with certain songs that give the drummer no opportunity to move off the basic rhythm to strike out the Star Power without breaking the score multiplier. Given that there is no “rescue” in “World Tour”, I think I prefer Rock Band’s approach better for drum power activation, though it would be nice if “Rock Band” considered some type of shortcut in the next iteration.
Vocals are straightforward — sing and match tone, and go from there. “World Tour” lacks the tambourine hits that you get as vocalist at times in “Rock Band” so there will be plenty of chances for the singer to go on a beer run during longer sets. “World Tour” also seems less finicky about tone, and thus is a tad easier than “Rock Band.”
While the various instruments are on par with “Rock Band”, “World Tour”’s band mode feels very different, at times trying to make it a more casual game but at others make it so that your band has to be grooving perfectly to really play well. Like “Rock Band”, your group all shares the same score and a band performance meter, but unlike the other game, you share the same Star Power meter. If a player performs badly, they don’t drop out, but their inability to get out of the red will bring down the rest of the band slowly unless they themselves kick up their performances. To activate Star Power, each member has to activate the Power at the same, requiring a lot of coordination from the band and can make it difficult if you have a mix of player skills in the band. It is not as enjoyable an experience as “Rock Band” — unlike that game, where if a player fails you can all (including the failed player) all come back and laugh at it, the approach in “World Tour” makes the failed player feel like a heel. Of course, this might have to do with how much more time I’ve spent in “Rock Band” and used to its band approach.
One of the weakest areas of the game is the soundtrack. They do have songs that make sense for a game: two from Jimi Hendrix, “Hotel California” by the Eagles, “Beat It” by Michael Jackson, and so on. They also have a decent selection of modern songs, including from Lacuna Coil and Paramore. But they have a number of songs from groups like Tool, System of a Down — mostly modern bands that are less rock-like than what “Guitar Hero” has given us in the past. I simply don’t care for those groups (maybe I’m an old fart) and their songs are either not very challenging, or are the hardest songs in the game. I appreciate having a depth of songs in these types of games, but I think the balance on this newer type of material is a bit too much, particularly when compared to “Rock Band 2″’s setlist, which I consider much more balanced. Clearly there is a younger market for the newer stuff, but even the first “Guitar Hero” included both the old and new. Let’s put it this way: I can logically see people having all the songs in “Rock Band 2″ in a random MP3 playlist, but there’s so many clashes between styles in “World Tour”’s as to make it just strange. But I end again pointing out that this is very subjective; the full lists of songs are out there for you to review to make your own call on this. That said, having a game full of original recordings instead of covers does help, and the quality of the soundtrack is up there.
So far the downloadable content has been coming steadily, certainly at a better rate than “Guitar Hero III”, with weekly releases since the game’s debut. But it’s lagging behind the volume of songs put out by “Rock Band.” Sure, there’s more Hendrix so far, and Metallica’s full “Death Magnetic” album is there, but right now, without any word on albums or longer-term plans, it doesn’t look great yet.
An interesting feature: “World Tour” has the ability to make custom songs and share them with others. The interface works similarly to music trackers of yore, allowing you to place notes perfectly as you work through a song, or if you are more talented, you can play your guitar or drums (no vocals though) to fill out the patterns and tweak them later. You have a variety of instrument voices to pick from, but these are basically similar to synthesizer voices and though you can apply effects to the notes, you’ll still end up with something that sounds synthesized instead of played off a real guitar or drums. Songs are also limited to three minutes or a total of 1200 notes — generally good for getting something down, but doesn’t allow for large complex guitar solos or drumlines. Plus, Activision makes sure that user-created songs don’t violate copyright, so while you can make covers of songs for your local friends to enjoy, you won’t be able to share it with others. It’s a nice feature, but there are a lot of limitations.
“Guitar Hero World Tour” suffers from unusual problems, even though it’s second out of the gate as a full band game. Many of the missteps from “Rock Band” that Harmonix corrected by the second game are present in “World Tour”, and even then, “World Tour” seems to lack the features that made “Rock Band” popular. It’s not a bad first effort, and from the hardware is still hands-down better than “Rock Band”’s current offering. But, it is a game that will disappoint hard-core fans of “Guitar Hero” looking for a challenging game. For those that host their own virtual band parties, the game isn’t quite as casual as “Rock Band”. If you already have a set of plastic instruments at home, you can’t go wrong with picking up the game-only part of “World Tour”, though I recommend reviewing the playlist to make sure it is to your taste — you may find that a good portion of the songs are not to your liking.
People often enjoy putting SEGA’s efforts down, but for me, they still retain much of their old magic, which made them great back in the day. With the release of under-appreciated gems, like Valkyria Chronicles, and the continued support of Japan-centric franchises which often fail to capture western audiences, like Yakuza here, I really can’t stay mad for long, even though I’d have damn good reasons to with the treatment some of their other franchises receive — yes, I’m looking at you Sonic Team. Try much harder. Read the rest…
By Brendon Lindsey | Sat, Jan 3, 2009
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