Beatboxer, lover, midnight snacker... I teach beatboxing at www.youtube.com/fattonybbx
Beatboxer, lover, midnight snacker... I teach beatboxing at www.youtube.com/fattonybbx
Member since:18.12.2004
Reviews:80
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Guitar Hero. Almost every gamer in the world has heard of this particular series of button-mashing finger-blistering music games. The relatively surprising success of the graphically atrocious and slightly tetchy first game (honestly, who has actually mastered the hammer-on system in GH1?) spawned two sequels and two genre-specific expansion-style games before reaching the Rock Band clone I'm reviewing today, with the two sequels being adored nearly universally.
But enough of that background information.
The concept behind Guitar Hero is very simple. You hold a guitar shaped controller with five buttons on the fret bar, hold one down, and strum by pushing a small bar up or down. Simple to learn but insanely difficult to master, as anybody who's ever attempted to five-star some of the more tricky songs will tell you.
Guitar Hero: World Tour (hereafter GHWT, because I'm lazy) brings something new to the series by... well, by rather shamelessly ripping off Rock Band. Instead of there being two options to play with, lead and rhythm or bass, there are now four - lead guitar, bass guitar, drums, and vocals. That is all I shall say on the instruments for now as I'd rather like to review them separately.
With the introduction out of the way, let's get down to business.
It isn't often
I'll lose all optimism in a series of anything. Like a fool I still cross my fingers every time I hear a new Sonic the Hedgehog game is coming out, hoping in vain that it'll be based on the paperclip-bound game notes I lost when I was a kid. But when I heard GHWT was going to be including the other instruments I was incredibly put off. I don't like Rock Band. The drums were clunky and unrealistic, and might as well have been replaced with a beatbox of some kind. The guitar was heavy and unresponsive, and the buttons were too far apart. It was as if they'd tried to be everything Guitar Hero was but with slight tweaks to avoid outright cloning the franchise.
GHWT looked even worse when some researching (read: YouTube browsing) revealed some embarrassingly easy tracks and a bizarre and horrible ending to Living On A Prayer.
Fortunately for me, GHWT is not Rock Band, and the second you load the game and access Quickplay only to see a jaw-dropping number of songs you can play right from the start you'll appreciate GHWT for what it is.
The gameplay is pretty much as it has been for the rest of the series. A few subtle changes have been made and several new ideas have been implemented. To start off small, hammer-ons and pull-offs have been reverted to the GH2 way of doing things meaning the enormous leeway you had playing GH3 is gone. This is brilliant in my opinion, although I can imagine several Expert-players around the country screaming in frustration during some of the faster songs. Star power has also been twiddled with. It's shared amongst the band with each instrument activating it in a different way. You can also fill up your star power gauge even while it's activated, meaning you won't have anything to lose by activating it.
Now for the bigger features.
The drum courses are very fun to play, although the change in colour scheme was confusing somewhat. The bass courses have an open strum which finally balances out the difficulty - bass was always easier than lead in the rest of the series. The vocals were a slight disappointment. Even though the friend we had testing them (hey, have you heard me sing? It ain't pretty) seemed to be a pro in disguise there was no notable difference between the difficulty levels.
Vocals and drums have little "freestyle" sections where you can earn bonus points, but to be honest they ruin the songs somewhat and we ultimately started ignoring them. The most points we earned came from yelling incoherently into the mic, or performing insanely long arm-shattering tom rolls on the drums. This just became annoying and distracting for the guitarists.
Speaking of guitarists, the new tapping sections are absolutely amazing. Being able to play one handed feels incredibly cool, even if the "sliding" is pathetic (see my review on the instruments for details).
The character creation tool is absolutely amazing. I was able to get a near-perfect clone of myself, complete with a bright pink flying-V guitar. The text entry was a little poor, but that's just nit-picking.
All of the above would be useless and pointless if the song didn't have a good soundtrack, and I'm absolutely delighted to say that the GHWT soundtrack is spot on. There is an amazing mix of songs from various dates and from various genres, and while some can be a little boring for an individual instrument it's fairly well balanced. The party feel is definitely there too. There's something about a room full of people all singing Sweet Home Alabama at the top of their lungs that you'll never find in another game.
It isn't to say the game is flawless. I've mentioned before the problem with the freestyle sections and sliding, and the difficulty is weird when it comes to the vocals. There are also some songs which are very poor. One particular gig in the career mode forces you to play a few very long and very dull songs that go on for what felt like ten minutes each. The screen can also get a little busy sometimes with three instruments and vocals at once, and you'll hear many cries of "wait, which side am I?" from the guitarists. Star power is also incredibly hard for the drummers to activate since they need to hit both cymbal pads at once - nearly impossible until there's a decent break in the song.
None of the above really phased me though, at least not enough to put me off playing. GHWT is still an amazing party game and has bought a genuinely fresh outlook to an increasingly-diluted genre of games. From this humble gamer, it has earned the title of "best game evarrr".
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