Where do you even begin to start with this game? So Activision has decided to join into the "full band" experience so that they can stay in the game with Rock Band doing so well and having a sequel. The game and its instrument bundles came out on all platforms on October 26, 2008. With rock band doing so well in the race is there even hope of guitar hero catching up?
So game modes let’s start from there. The modes are pretty much the same as what there was in Activision's last guitar hero, there's career, quick play, online, versus battles. But they also added a some new ones like the new custom track mixer thing and on the Wii version only to Mii freestyle. Also something new that they added in was character creation. which can have a lot of variations in it because you can adjust everything little detail on the dude's/gal's body everything from like the size of their eyes brows to like the width of their chin. And that goes for the guitars as well, being able to customize every section of it. I’ll skip over most of the modes since they are very similar to the old ones and I’ll talk about the game play in the next section. so the new track mixer sounds like a brilliant idea right? to try and get user content up and essential having the public make songs to share with everyone. WRONG the mixer only makes MIDI like songs, so there's no singing and you can only work with a set amount of sounds so all this will come to is just crazy guitar solos and crazy drum solos. It’ll be hard for those who looking for a challenge. But for those who wanted to make a remix version of Flo Rida - Low well. Let’s just say that it’s not going to be possible. Why did they do this? Well it’s simple. Activision didn’t want to get their pants sued off them. so that's all we can get, custom tracks that sound like ringtones... which sucks... I don’t know much about the Wii's Mii freestyle. But it sounds like a gimmick so yeah.. Not much to say.
Game play. So what’s changed after introducing a set of new drums and mic to the game? Nothing much. But you can't save band members if they decide to play a difficulty level that they can’t handle, so once they fail its game over and you'll have to restart the song. The good news is that the star power gauge is shared between the entire band so if anyone needs to save themselves can just use it at any time of the game. And I mean anytime. Unlike in rock band where the mic and drums can only activate their "overdrive" in certain sections of the section, in guitar hero world tour every player can activate star power anytime they want. I’m still fuzzy on how to activate star power on the mic, maybe I just yell into it? I don’t know. But I like how they did it for drums. You simply just smash the two symbols (yellow and orange) together at the same time anywhere in the song to start it, even if you hit star power when there's a note to play, the game will ignore it so that you can keep up your combo which is a nice feature. Another interesting thing that I noticed them do is that whenever the game is paused for some reason and you want to unpause it, the game does a countdown for everyone so that they can continue playing at the same time without screwing up the first 5 notes, a very nice touch I must say indeed. Another thing that should be noted is the g-slide function thing on the new guitar. Similar to rock band for the solo keys, the g-slide is touching sensitive so that you can just move your finger to play. This is clearly just a gimmick to try to copy rock band because it doesn’t work that well. And it’s not very clear when you can use it for not. So this one’s a no good Activision. The new instruments feel great to play when they work properly. As always the buttons on the guitar feel good to press and the new strum bar is a mix of the clicky old one and rock band's mushy one. The drums free great to play, especially when activating star power, something about smashing those symbols just makes it all free good. But it seems like I’m not the only person having issues with it too. The symbols need to be constantly tightened so that they register the notes properly, but when everything is working properly, it’s hard to tell the difference between guitar hero and its competitor rock band.
As far as tracks go, all the songs that comes with guitar hero world tour (the 85 or so) are all master tracks from the original artists, so no covers which is always good to hear. And that means that the sound quality is at its best, less can be said about the tracks that can be made with the mixer. I’m sure there will be songs that will be interesting to in the custom section but it won’t me making them because the mixer is probably one of the hardest things to use on a console ever. And the tutorials they have are as annoying as the ones I had to sit through on Little Big Planet. It might be fun to use... if I could understand it and it actually liked better...
so how does this fair up to rock band and rock band 2? For Activision's first attempt I think they did quite well for a first attempt. There nearly isn’t enough tracks compared to the rock band franchise but at least the track mixer will soften the blow, a little. Also without a "no fail" mode it'll hard for the casual market to hope on and play, seeing as there's no way to save your band members. The instruments need some work on seeing how the drums are having issues.
With only selling half the amount of units guitar hero 3 did in the first week, this game might not do so well but nobody will know if they can make or not until they make a second one to fix up all the issues.
I don’t know why chan is making me do this but. The game is available on all consoles and you can play up to 4 players locally or online.
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