It’s unfortunate, but while the character customization is fantastic, a huge area that Guitar Hero World Tour falls short in is the career mode. In the career, you look at a bulletin board with a bunch of places looking for performers, and you pick one and play it. Most of these options are short three or four song sets with an encore. It’s not necessarily a bad way to set up the career mode, but with Rock Band 2 offering the ability to hire staff, earn planes and buses and all of that, this method of just playing sets and unlocking songs just feels kind of dated. With the great set list and their superior note tracking, it seems like such a waste to have such a lack-luster and played out career mode. It’s not that the career mode isn’t fun to play, because it still is, but I expected a little more innovation out of Neversoft.
It is still fun to get your buddies together and jump into quick play and play a few songs. Now, rather than picking only one song in quick play, World Tour allows players to choose up to six to keep the music constantly flowing. With the stellar track list, I had a ton of fun having people over and rocking out. Just keep in mind that your career mode with multiple people is separate from your solo career, so any progress you make while playing with friends will not help your solo progress, so your best bet is to just unlock all the songs when you’re alone and select the quick play mode to play with friends.
The online multiplayer in the game isn’t anything to write home about, but it gets the job done. There are several modes available such as Face Off and Pro Face Off, as well as band versus band play. In Face Off each person plays part of the song, switching back in forth, while in Pro Face Off each person plays the song in its entirety. They are both staples of Guitar Hero multiplayer. While they are certainly fun modes to play, it would have been nice to see a few new modes online. There is also to option to do a band quick play with random people or with your friends, and playing the career mode online is a welcomed addition.
While the game doesn’t offer too much innovation via the career mode, that’s not to say there is nothing here that is new and fresh. For bassists they added a purple bar that comes across the screen and is played by only strumming without hitting any of the frets; it doesn’t really make things much harder, but since some bass songs can get pretty boring it’s nice to have a 6th type of note to worry about. For guitar there are stretches of notes linked together by a purple line, and whenever you see these you can slide up the touch pad and play without strumming. It’s kind of like a long hammer on set, but if you miss one it doesn’t break the whole chain.
The biggest innovation in this game, and most likely the biggest innovation to music games since Guitar Hero entered the picture, is the addition of a music creator. While it’s not as deep as a PC program for professionals, there is still a lot you can do here, and you can lay down tracks for all of the major instruments except vocals. I assume that due to copyright issues vocals had to get the axe, but it’s alright, because there is still plenty to do in there. You can first jump into the studio and record yourself messing around and laying down some tracks. Then you can take that track into GH Mix and tinker and fine tune it to perfection. I’m no musical genius, but I was able to lay down some decent songs on the drums and guitar, and with the tutorials it wasn’t overly hard for me to figure out how to do so. It’s not something that will interest everyone who buys the game, but for people who always wanted to make some music but can’t play a real instrument this just might be for you.
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I am having a great time playing the drums, the cymbal pads really bring the game to life. Tapping on the guitar neck, eh not too much a fan of that myself. Great review!