Written by Jeff Buckland, 11/22/2008
Played on:
Xbox 360
Just after the end of Dream Theater's "Pull Me Under", a friend asked: in what world does the song's last line make any sense? I turned to her with a straight face and answered: "It's the world where our band has Sting on bass and Zakk Wylde on guitar, and we're rocking out on a viking ship flying through the sky being pulled by magical gryphons." It turns out it's actually Shakespeare that was quoted at the end of that the song, but yes, that scene is actually what we saw in the venue we had just finished - gryphons and all.
That whole wacky situation sums up the craziness that you can expect in Guitar Hero: World Tour pretty well. The music franchise that seemed to call out Dance Dance Revolution on being too weird and just embarrassing to be seen playing is back, and this time they've brought a whole band with them. Yep, following in the footsteps of Guitar Hero creators Harmonix, who have since moved on to their own Rock Band franchise, Activision and developer Neversoft have given World Tour the full-band treatment - assuming you buy the full package and use a second guitar controller, that is. But you'll quickly find that while Neversoft has tried to differentiate this new GH from the rest of the pack, their haphazard addition of features is very hit-and-miss.
It's going to be almost impossible to do this review without constant comparisons to Rock Band, considering just how much is similar between the two games. It's not just that you can create your own band members, not just that you unlock rock songs from the past 30+ years and play through them as a career or in a playlist, and it's not just that World Tour shares a good dozen songs out of 80+ with its rival, Rock Band 2. It's also the MTV style, the way notes are played and multipliers are gained and lost, and the antics of band members on stage in the background.
And it's also in the instruments: while World Tour does make a few changes from the Rock Band standard in adding the drum controller and microphone, the biggest one is adding a cymbal to the drum controller and then raising both cymbals up, giving the player a total of 5 pads to hit plus the bass pedal. Oh, sure, the guitar has some new touch panel that allows players to slide their fingers up and down in special parts of a song, but I find this feature rather gimmicky and I only wound up losing my multipliers; thanks, but I'll stick with the five fret buttons for those notes. Singers and drummers can now also activate Star Power whenever they want, which is a pretty important change for Rock Band players who are used to being told when they can activate Overdrive, but there's very little difference on the bass and guitar.
All that said, the drum kit is just plain fantastic. The raised cymbals add a much-needed element of realism to the whole thing, and the pads are large, quiet to hit, and very accurate. My RB2 drums suffer from a serious issue where hitting a pad a certain way will cause a double strike and force the game to dump my multiplier (this can happen many times in a row, too). GH:WT's drums are much better, and I also like having no crossbars on the bottom of the kit, giving me the freedom to slide the bass pedal away from me much more. If you're serious about video game drumming, you owe it to yourself to at least get a few minutes on one of these kits (yes, even if you've got a $300 ION Rocker kit for RB2). There have been some fairly major issues with the instruments reported , but considering how my living room has become like a graveyard for cheap plastic game instruments, it's not like this is the first time I've had issues with these things - I'm on my fourth drum kit across three games now, and have cast off at least three guitar controllers as well.
World Tour has also included some original content, like adding real musicians to the game - Billy Corgan, Sting, Ozzy Osbourne and his guitarist Zakk Wylde, Jimi Hendrix, Ted Nugent, and, well, Tool (sorta - it's very much in their own reclusive style). It's kind of weird because while Billy Corgan comes out for Smashing Pumpkins' "Today" and Hendrix comes out for "The Wind Cries Mary" and "Purple Haze (Live)", sometimes some artists will stay with you throughout the gig. Ozzy will stay on stage sometimes and sing songs from other artists, although it's still the original master tracks so it's strange seeing a rather convincing likeness of Ozzy - one of the best of these real-life licenses in the game - singing in the original artist's voice.
Most of the features from GH3 are back, like versus and online play, although one thing that I kind of miss was the ability to cooperatively play rhythm and lead guitar in some of the songs. Here, it's just guitar and bass that are available. Also, it seems to me like the look of the GH "highway", with its round-shaped notes and such, is just kind of outdated and old, being as it's hardly been touched since the days of the first game (and that even dates back to Harmonix' first major game, Frequency, from eight years back). Even Harmonix fixed this by spiffing up the note track in Rock Band, and I think for the next game a serious visual overhaul is in order. Even if Activision feels that this is some kind of "unique" or "distinctive" look, to me all it does is distinctively make the whole franchise feel old and busted. Guitar Hero deserves better than that.
