Guitar Hero: World Tour
Well, I was dumb and let the hype get to me....
Guitar Hero World Tour: I wanted to like it!
Well, we all know I like Rock Band a lot more than Guitar Hero, so anything negative I say will be misconstrued as fanboyism, but I assure you, it’s not. You see, last night after I got LittleBigPlanet, I came to find out that Guitar Hero: World tour was coming out today! Well, for some reason, I was stoked, and planned today around getting and playing it.
Got up nice and early to get the game, happily jogged to the store (a good 45 Minute walk, I might add.) thinking to myself the entire time how happy I was to get another band game in my repertoire, and how much I looked forward to playing L’via L’viaquez, Pull Me Under, Hot For Teacher, Crazy Train, and about 20 other songs I REALLY wanted to play. I was really pumping myself up for disappointment…
I got home, popped the game in my system, installed it, and got ready to have my mind blown! I started by making a Rocker, which was surprisingly unfun, considering how shallow the Rock Band create-a-rocker was, and how much more fun it was to play round with. I ended up just picking some basic trenchcoat and spiky hair, but I really didn’t customize him all that well, I just didn’t care, I wanted to play the songs.
Anyway, I didn’t get the bundle, I think that is relevant to this review, as I cannot and will not discuss the Guitar Hero instruments at great length, but from what I hear, a lot of the guitars and drums are faulty….I wish to enjoy that bit of irony for just a moment….that’s right Brian Bright, you’re an idiot.
So, I get to the first set, which is a new way of playing. Instead of Tiers, it’s sets, and instead of picking each song you want to play out of it in whichever order, however you wish, you pick the set, and are forced to do the entire set in one sitting. Each Set is 2-6 songs long, and most have encores that you can’t see in advance.
It’s rather irritating, but it works, at least it’s better than Rock Band 2’s erratic world tour mode that has you do the same songs over and over again before advancing. The main problem with this is that there seems to be no rhyme or reason behind the order you play them in. In most games, the difficulty would increase as you played, but here, it would go all over the place. I was getting 100% on songs, then almost failing the next song in the set, then going back to getting near perfect. It’s really quite irritating, and this is what makes me long again for some sort of comprehensive tiering system like in Rock Band.
I do apologize for all the references to Rock Band, but it’s a good comparison, as it’s the game that did all this first…and better.
Anyway, I start playing songs, and I’m noticing far too many are songs I’ve already got in Rock Band…but that’s okay, because for some reason the songs that are in both happen to be amongst the most fun songs in Guitar Hero: World Tour.
Anyway, as for the charts and stuff, there’s some Pros and Cons I’d like to point out. (keep in mind, I was only playing Guitar….so you know.)
Pros:
1 - The game, as a whole, is far cleaner and more polished than Guitar Hero 3. the notes look the same, but a lot of the effects, such as the fire on the notes as you hit them, and starpower when you get it, are far less obtrusive. Even the “Star Power ready” and “100 note streak” notifications are far less invasive and distracting.
2 - You can FINALLY get star power while in star power! Thank you Activision, this is necessary!
3 - The sustains work somewhat differently, as you can hit other notes while during some sustains. This irritated me at first, and can be ignored without penalty, so it’s just a nice aesthetic, I suppose.
4 - The purple string mechanic, where you can use the touch strip, is really fun. It can feel like I’m cheating, since on the Rock Band guitar, using the basic OR lower frets works as if you were touching the touch strip. I suppose it makes the game easier, but it’s more fun.
Cons:
1 - holy Overcharted batman! Words cannot describe how bad the overcharting is in this game, but from what I can tell, it’s FAR worse than in Guitar Hero 3. In this game, almost every song is overcharted in some way or another. Even Livin On a Prayer, which was the first song, had a set of ascending triplets that were supposed to just be a whammy bar. I know a lot of people like excessive challenge, and good for them, but I can’t stand seeing a WALL of nothing but 2-4 note chords, all the time. It seems that over 50% of the notes were chords, and there was a lot of “strum when that should have been a whammy” or “that was just a sound effect, but I’ll strum a note for it anyway!” I’m sorry to say the Overcharting is worse than ever.
2 - Undercharting is there too! Yeah, there were even a few songs where I could clearly hear a far more interesting guitar part playing in the background, but I was reluctantly placed on rhythm. Band on the Run and one of the Tool songs are the only examples I can think of at the moment.
3 - Aesthetically ugly game overall. It’s better than GH3, but it’s still not as clean as it should be, and just navigating menus is a chore and hurts the eyes.
4 - it was EASY! Seriously, when guitar Hero is known for it’s difficulty, I found this disappointingly simple, save 2 songs. I was able to get through pretty much the entire game without using starpower and without leaving the green, even on the solos for Hot for Teacher and Crazy Train. Maybe the HO/PO window is still too large, and it doesn’t help that I have the touchstrip functionality on my frets, but it really was NOT a hard game. The only exceptions were BYOB, which angered me to no end because the chart is almost identical to Rock Band, but I kept failing at 4-10%, and that enraged me. The only other difficult song was Satch Boogie, which is only challenging for one part that’s nothing but a slide up and down the fretboard constantly for a minute or so. I still am unable to do Satch boogie, but I stopped caring.
5 - Was that a story they were trying to convey? Something about the devil and souls and shit like you teaming up with Ozzy, Sting, and travis Barker….I really don’t know, it was dumb and made no sense.
6 - Still Broken boss battles. Not as bad as GH3, but still irritating and unfun. They also aren’t bosses, just people you randomly meet and have to see if you’re ‘cool’ enough to shred with them.
Now, there are some things I didn’t really touch on, like the music studio and band functionality, but as it stands, I didn’t really have the chance. This is just the preliminary run-through playing all the guitar charts (Because this IS Guitar Hero, not Band hero…) Expect a more thorough review later if and when I ever play the game.
As it stands, I’m very disappointed. The Track List was far less fun than I was expecting, the features seemed unimpressive and bland, and overall, I really think they could’ve had a winner here, but like I said, I can’t help but be incredibly disappointed.
Overall Pros:
RB instruments work with it, new guitar functionality, diverse and large setlist, Music Studio, Indepth character creation, fixed game mechanics for starpower.
Overall Cons:
Disgustingly overcharted songs, ugly presentation, horribly thought out world tour mode, music studio is far too complicated to take full advantage of, about 30% of the setlist is actually quite boring, too easy, Lame attempt at a story.
Reviewers score - 72/100
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