The Game Composer’s Blog

Soundtrack of the Month #6: Guitar Hero World Tour review

Guitar Hero 3 was a smash hit for us and our friends last year. Not a party went by without someone turning on their Wii and handing out the guitars. It was a great game. The difficulty may have been out of whack a little bit but overall it was an excellent party and solo game.

Than came Rock Band and the whole experience got turned up a notch. The first time I played, being a rock drummer and all, I took the drums and said to put it on Hard difficulty. Shouldn’t be a problem for a real drummer. Oops… failed out in the first quarter of the song. Real drums have about as much in common with the game as real guitars do. But I digress. No longer could music games be limited to one instrument. The social aspect of Rock Band was incredible. Teamwork, planning, and the ecstasy of shared victories and shame of shared defeats propelled Rock Band to one of the best multiplayer games of all time. Guitar Hero was history. But not for long.

Now we have Guitar Hero World Tour (reviewed here on the Wii). The full package includes a guitar, a mic, and a drumset. Up to four players can play at a time in the main game with vocal, guitar, bass, and drum parts. Since Rock Band set the bar so high and did so many things right, it’s useful to make comparisons between the two games. How does this game fare in light of what Rock Band did so well?

First off, the gripes.

1) It’s very difficult to see how the other players are doing. The a small, undecipherable mater system on screen that you can refer to, but in the heat of music making it’s very hard to get a good grasp of how everyone is doing. Rock Band’s meter got it exactly right and Neversoft (the GH developers) need to just swallow that fact and implement a similar system. Far too often, things start flashing red and it’s all over.

2) And it only takes one person to fail to make everyone fail the song. There are no “saves”. Once one person drops out, everyone is dead. It’s pretty harsh and, really, not any more realistic than saving people. A rock band can actually still go on even if the bass player’s jack comes out of his bass or the singer suffers a cocaine and Jolt-induced heart attack on stage. Why they chose to make this so harsh is a mystery… though it does stay consistent with the previous games of the series. I was quite disappointed about this one because one of the great social aspects of Rock Band is the instant team building feeling you get when bringing someone back to life. Then again, you do get a greater sense of accomplishment when everyone makes it through a tough song in one piece. To make up for the lack of saving, you can have anyone use Star Power to help everyone through tough sections.

3) Ah, but activating Star Power on drums is something of a black art. You’re supposed to hit both cymbals at the same time. Sometimes this breaks your streak and sometimes it doesn’t. But I feel it’s almost not worth it sometimes if it’s going to break your streak. They need to find a better method of activating Star Power on the drums in the next game. Rock Band’s system isn’t perfect either, but at least you know exactly when you’ll activate it and aren’t in danger of breaking one of your crucial streaks.

4) The lyrics are hard to read on the Wii version! Whatever font that is, it’s ugly and usually illegible. We play on a 42″ HDTV and use component cables so that’s about as good as it’s going to get. Luckily, the words you sing don’t really matter, but I don’t always want to be freestylin’, yo.

5) Song library. Wayyyyy smaller than Rock Band 1 and 2′s. Way smaller. But this will grow over time.

6) The music creator system is a joke. The creation system is unintuitive and extremely difficult to figure out. Even if you do figure it out, the instrument samples they use are horrible and your song will sound like bad MIDI (is there any other kind?). Rock Band doesn’t have a creation system and Guitar Hero should have just left it out and concentrated more on the main gameplay.

So, those are the main gripes. It fumbles the ball in many ways, though none of them are deal breakers by any means. What are the bright spots?

1) Better note charts. All the instruments feel just a little bit more like you’re playing the real music. The open note idea on the bass lines is pretty cool.

2) The drum set is much better. I love having the cymbals raised. It’s slightly more like playing a real drumset. Unfortunately, the bass drum pedal only has about a centimeter of give so that doesn’t feel quite as good, but overall I have much more fun playing these drums than Rock Band’s.

3) Better guitar… the feel of Guitar Hero’s guitar is better than Rock Band’s, especially the strum bar. We prefer the clickier feel of GH’s bar. The raised color buttons makes it easier to find your way around than RB’s sytem as well. The Star Power button is a new addition and works well once you get used to it.

4) The character creator/editor is much more fun and interesting than the Rock Band system’s. The variety of stuff to outfit your rocker with is staggering and there is some outrageous stuff to buy.

5) Overall feel is more rockin’. They nail the rock and roll atmosphere. The character creator helps, but the graphics and menus just drip rock. From the time you first boot the game up, you just want to rock. Rock Band is just a little more sterile than Guitar Hero in this regard.

So, there’s my little pseudo-review/comparison of Guitar Hero World Tour. It’s definitely the better game on the Wii, but if I had to choose between GH:WT on the Wii or Rock Band 2 on the PS3 or 360, I’d give a slight edge to Rock Band 2. The mutliplayer aspect is just a bit better done on RB2 because of the save system and ease of seeing how everyone is doing. Luckily, the Wii instrument peripherals should work on RB2 when it comes out on the Wii so we can get the best of both worlds.

I love that there is healthy competition between these two games. That means they will both be constantly striving to improve their games. They’re both already excellent games and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend either one to people. But we’re in for at least a good few years of excellent music gaming.

Verdict: Required Listening

December 23, 2008 - Posted by thegamecomposer | Reviews | game music, Guitar Hero, Reviews