Guitar Hero World Tour

Guitar Hero: World Tour

Rating: T

Score: 9.5/10

After the Guitar Hero franchise rocked the guitar peripheral, the next obvious evolution would be the rest of the band. Is this game the best of its genre, or is it still stuck in its guitar-only past? This game is available for the Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, Playstation 2, and Playstation 3. 

You might think that five previous games would have already taken the best of the bunch as far as actual good songs go.  However, this is not the case. Proving that they still have plenty of amazingly good songs to stuff onto one disk, they included “Hotel California”, “American Woman”, “Eye of the Tiger”, “What I’ve Done”, and “Crazy Train”. All are fun to play on each instrument, but it’s sometimes obvious when a song focuses on one instrument.

 Speaking of instruments, the new instruments in this game include drums and a microphone. The mic is obvious, you sing in it. You need only to follow the correct pitch to be successful; no actual singing talent required. Most people prefer drums to mic and guitar, though. Why? Because singing and strumming - that’s ok, but hitting stuff? Awesome! This drum set comes complete with cymbals; hitting both cymbals at once activates Star Power.

If none of the over eighty songs are enough to impress, then your tastes are too expensive.  The only song you’ll like is one you make yourself.  I kid you not, this time you can produce your own song.

There’s thousands of different ways to change pitch, beat, tempo, volume (Add some volume to your guitar during solos!), sound type, and such. In fact, you’ll need god-like patience to make the bare basics of a good song. If you already have something in mind, then you can just choose a half a dozen or so settings, then get started. If you’re not good on drums, nor are any of your friends, it’s not a problem. You can just use a guitar to play the “Drum Machine”. You can set how and what the drum plays, and loop it to play constantly. Example: You and your friend are best on guitars. You plan on making a metal song. You simply set the drums to play metal, and play with the frets to make the drums play different loops. Hold down two frets to make a different loop. Once you set the looping for the drums, you and your friend can jam out to a repeating beat. Once you and your friend are finished, you can move everything to GHMix, which can be used to edit the music you just made. Once you’ve moved around the beat, put in a few extra notes, and added rhythm guitar and keyboard (both are optional), you can then save your song. Once saved, you can re-play the song, send it to a friend, or send it online for everyone to download and enjoy!

Customization has been upgraded, heavily. As any GH3 fan remembers, there was little customization available. Pick a character, pick a guitar, and go out there and rock some faces off. In this one, you can customize accessories (sunglasses, necklaces, wrist bands, and such), pick pants, shirts, skin types, colours of skin, mouths, size of the mouths, angle of mouths, colour of mouths, and such. Then go to the instruments. Pick guitar base, paint it, and pick some strings, nitpick a few small little details like the Whammy Bar size and your guitar is good to go. You customize everything from the whole base of drums, to the type, size, and colour of the drumsticks.

Even though Guitar Hero has evolved into a whole band experience, its core is still the greatness gamers have loved for nearly a decade. All the customizations in World Tour make it look like Guitar Hero 3 was nothing in comparison. It’s still not a huge advancement for the genre, but it’s a huge advancement for the Guitar Hero franchise.