Rock Band was a good name for a band emulation video game. It was, after all, a game in which you could play guitar, or play drums or sing. Guitar Hero: World Tour, on the other hand, is a terrible name for a band emulation videogame, because the only clue that it is not just a guitar game is that it comes in a really big box.
Activision’s Rock Band clone falls short of the original in more ways than in the title, although in other ways it is quite successful.
The Basics
The basics are those of Rock Band, which itself was an expanded take on Guitar Hero (both games were designed by Harmonix, who no longer does the Guitar Hero series). While a song plays and an indicator shows gliding colored markers, players using a guitar peripheral must press a matching colored button on the fret board at the right time. Or with a drum peripheral bang on the correct color-coded drum or cymbal pad. Or with a microphone try to sing along with the vocalist. Get a group of your friends together and you can form a little band, with a player on drums, guitar, bass and vocals.
A meter tells you how well you are playing. Play well and a virtual crowd cheers, play poorly and they boo you off stage.
The guitar and drum peripherals are cleverly designed to use the Wii remote, which you insert inside the peripheral, allowing the drums and guitar to use the remote’s wireless connection.
Drum Troubles
When I played Rock Band, the instrument I liked best was the drums, so this was the first instrument I tried in World Tour. Unfortunately I discovered the cymbals wouldn’t register unless I hit them somewhat ahead of the beat, which prevented my from feeling connected too the song. This turned out to be a known issue, (where was Activision’s quality control?) A replacement drum kit was no better.
It took a lot of effort for me to learn to play the cymbals ahead of the beat, so at first I could only play drums on easy. Unfortunately the easy setting for drums is much more boring than the easy setting in Rock Band. On the Road Again, the first song I played, was a painfully tedious exercise in repetitive pounding.
Playing in career mode, in which you have to play a collection of songs in order to unlock more collections of songs to play, I hit World Tour’s drumming nadir when I could not make it past the Beastie Boys grating “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.” Even on easy, I could not get past the song in several attempts. Fortunately World Tour allows players to reset the difficulty level at any time, and I could get past the game on “beginner” mode. But it was awful, because the entire song consisted of using the foot pedal to keep the beat. This was utterly exhausting. After a minute my foot was worn out so I picked up the pedal and used my hands to keep it going. It was agonizing.
Eventually I got a drum tuning kit from Activision and found turning up the cymbal sensitivity helped a lot. But even then I didn't feel the arrangements were as good as Rock Band's.But the Guitar is Still Solid
I was in a bad mood from drumming when I started on the guitar, which may be why at first I thought it was a little dull too. In truth, some songs are a little dull on the medium setting, but others are a lot of fun. Things are more entertaining on hard mode, although this can be pretty brutal. Fortunately at any point you can go into practice mode in which you can play through the song without getting booed offstage, and even better can play the song at slower speeds to learn its tricky passages.
The guitar peripheral has something new, a slide section on the fret board that can be used to play songs somewhat differently. I never really got the hang of it, but I appreciate the effort to add something new.
When I played Rock Band I felt that, just as in a real band the most boring instrument to play was bass. Surprisingly, bass was where I had the most fun in World Tour. The sensuous bass lines are cool, and I really felt the artistry of the instrument. It is also the easiest of the instruments, and the only one I could come close to getting through on the most difficult setting.
The Rest
There’s not really much to World Tour’s career mode, which simply asks you to play a bunch of songs to unlock more songs. No effort is made to make career mode interesting, unlike Rock Band, which tried to create a sense you were really on tour. It adds little to the game experience, and you are forced to play every song, no matter how detestable.
I eventually switched to Quick Mode, in which you can choose your own selection of songs, even though, you can’t unlock additional songs that way.
The game has a few extras, such as online play. I tried to check this out, but an online search found no one to play with. Hopefully after Christmas it will be possible to find someone to jam with.
There is also a mode that allows you to create your own songs which can then be played as part of the game. Just as in a real recording studio you can record each track separately. It’s an ingenious idea, although I can’t say I came up with anything worth listening to.
It is perplexing to be underwhelmed by a video game that has received rave reviews, but then, I seem to be the only critic who has had a problem with the drums. Take the drums out of the equation and World Tour would be a very good guitar game that measures up well with previous Guitar Hero games. Even though the tuning kit did alleviate the problem to a great degree, getting it to work right was too much aggravation. Based on my experience, this game’s most apt title would be, Guitar Hero: The Drums Were a Bad Idea.
Note: Had the drums worked from the get go I would have given World Tour 3 1/2 stars.
