Guitar Hero World Tour

Last week the latest Guitar Hero game was released here in Europe, and of course I did the same as with the previous titles and bought it !

This time the game goes Rock Band style with the “band” mode, including drums and vocals besides the guitar and bass from previous games.

The drum kit looks nice. It feels like it can take a beating, and the velocity sensing seems to work fine though it takes some getting used to. The cymbals are the exception, since they only register properly closer to the middle which tends to screw some of the quick repetitive sections, sometimes. The guitar suffered a few tweaks and got a new gimmick. The touchpad, is a bit superfluous, you can do more or less the same in the fret buttons which actually feels better (at least for me ), but the other tweaks make the guitar the best made to date.

Gameplay wise its pretty much like every other guitar hero, with some additions. The guitar got notes connected by purple lines which can be played sliding your fingers in the touchpad or by pressing the frets without strumming, the bass has free notes where you only need to strum with no fret, the drums have “armored” notes that you need to hit harder to score additional notes, and the mic, well I have no idea about this one to be honest .

Career mode is similar to previous games, clearly weaker than the similar mode in the competitor Rock Band, but even though it doesn’t actually add anything special to the game it fulfills its job.

The user interface is one aspect that leaves allot to be desired, specially in band mode. There is one star power gauge for the whole band located in the top left corner of the screen where someone playing in the center and right highways, will have some trouble seeing. Worse than that is that the gauge measuring the band’s performance is in the same place making it very very hard to know if someone is about to fail (not that anyone could do anything about it).

The other issue is the song list. The songs are divided in the ones that came with the game and the downloaded content, and that’s it. If you make a reasonable number of purchases it will become harder and harder to find what you want and the sorting options don’t help that much.

The other significant feature is the ability to create your own rocker. The customization options are big and extend to the instruments themselves. Before getting the game I thought that his was nice but nothing that special, but the truth is, that having a rocker created by you  together with the improved animations (and the crowd singing along when you are doing good) makes the game’s immersion better than ever. It’s a very nice feature, and very well implemented.

The game also includes a studio where you can create new songs from scratch and share them online with everyone, but personally it’s too much trouble for me. I did find some pretty nice ones online so some people do have talent and patience for this, but its unfortunate that the sound of these songs is of somewhat low quality.

Of course the main thing of a rhythm game is the sound track and all the good and bad things I spoke earlier can be made void by a good or bad set of songs. Fortunately Guitar Hero World Tour has a great set. Sure not all of them are good, but there is certainly a good amount of songs to please everyone. Eye of the Tiger ROCKS !!!!

So, to sum it up, Guitar Hero World Tour is a great game and since EA managed to never get even the first Rock Band to Portugal (and getting it to Europe only one year after its launch) I never had even one hint of doubt about which to get.

Explore posts in the same categories: Ramblings, Video Games

Tags: GHWT, Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero World Tour, PS3, World Tour

You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.