Guitar Hero World Tour review

We review Guitar Hero World Tour, a rhythm game that has the chops but stumbles over its own amplifier

Published on Sep 3, 2009

The thought of being a rock star may seem attractive when you’re sitting at your day job, aimlessly staring through the window as the day ticks on by and the sun rolls across the sky but, if Guitar Hero has anything to say on the matter, being a rock star isn’t all that easy.

You’re probably familiar with it by now but, in case you’re not, Guitar Hero is a rhythm game where you have to press buttons in rhythm with the music. Songs are all pre-programmed so that you actually feel like you’re playing the guitar lines from the song. In World Tour, you get to play the drums as well as the guitar.

Three different types of note fly down the screen, activated by pressing the 4,5 and 6 keys. When playing the drums, you also have to hit the bass drum, which is done by tapping 7, 8, 9 or 0- different keys are quicker to press depending on where your fingers are, so this is useful.

The song list is particularly good too. You start off with access to four songs, including Lenny Kravitz’s Are You Gonna Go My Way. Once you’ve completed either the guitar or drum tracks on each of these, further tracks are unlocked. There are 16 in total, spanning from the 70s to the 00s. Thankfully, they’re all suitably rock-tinged, including tracks from Interpol, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Smashing Pumpkins.

Obviously, your phone’s internal synthesiser limits the sound quality, since there’s just not enough room to fit the actual sound files into the game. Considering this though, the songs are remarkably well programmed.

Fast as Guitar Hero World Tour may be sprinting ahead at this point, it only makes it fall down even harder as technical issues place banana skins at its feet. Although the song speed itself remains the same, the interval at which the note markers connect with the points at which you gave to press the buttons changes too much within the space of a song.

It varies between songs, and even between plays, but you’ll frequently feel like you aren’t playing the song at all, just waiting for the note symbols to reach the bottom of the screen. It’s truly disappointing that this occurs when Hands-On has published a string of Guitar Hero titles over the past couple of years.

Everything else is in place- ok the visuals don’t deserve huge praise- but the deficiencies of the game engine knock Guitar Hero World Tour down enough pegs so that’s it’s singing in an entirely different register from the one intended. It would have been a headliner, and now it’s singing to a handful of frustrated bystanders.