Man, that was one hell of a new year’s eve party, only
getting over it now. A couple of years ago I celebrated this occasion by
talking to you about DJ Hero, a spin-off series from- Oh haha, spin off, that’s
a joke-… Where was I? Oh right, Guitar Hero. That series really created a boom
in music rhythm games; I’m sure they existed before, but now you could easily
pretend to be your favorite rock star in your own home with a real fake guitar.
For a while though, the name explained the big, obvious hole in the series:
what if you fantasized about being the next Mick Jagger instead of Keith
Richards? Well the fourth game fixed that by letting full band join in. Let’s
see how that turned out with Guitar Hero: World Tour available for a bunch of
consoles I don’t feel like listing off, including the Wii as I have it.
I now realize that I haven’t yet talked about the Guitar
Hero series directly, only mentioning it in other rhythm game reviews. Like
most of them, Guitar Hero will have you quote-unquote “playing” a song by
hitting certain buttons at certain times to play “notes”. Continuously hitting
correct notes will increase your score and make the Rock Meter go up, while
missing them or hitting incorre6ct ones will make it go down and eventually
fail the song. If you find yourself in danger of failing, you can activate Star
Power (provided you’ve collected enough Star shaped notes earlier).
That’s the basic Guitar Hero format, so what’s new? I
already mentioned the new instruments: they work basically in the same way, hit
the right note at the right time to get a higher score. There are also some
game play changes due to the fact that they wanted to concentrate more on
allowing a bunch of people of multiple skills levels to join in. This includes shared
Star Power (which I don’t like), a beginner mode, and the ability to change
your difficulty at any point in the career mode (a great change).
Another new feature in this game is the song creator, where
you can make your own music and send it out for other people to hear. Some of
the ones I’ve downloaded are really good. Since I have the Wii version, there
are a lot of great remakes of Nintendo songs (I don’t know if there are as many
on other versions of this game). There are also a lot of covers of other famous
songs, and a few original (which I doubt get as many downloads). However, this
mode does have its limits, most noticeably that you can’t do anything with a
microphone. I also find this mode to be a distraction at best (I seriously
forgot about it until I wrote this review) and the controls for creating music
a little user unfriendly. Not something I consider and attraction for the game
personally, but some may have a lot of fun with it.
However, the final big addition is the custom character
creator, and it’s the one that caused me the most problem, and I’ll try my best
to explain why. See, for this version of Guitar Hero, the makers decided to
give you the option of putting “yourself” in the game by creating an avatar. My
problem is that in Guitar Hero 3, we got a story, and a very fun one at that,
which they were able to make due to showing the rest of the band. However,
since you can be the “rest of the band”, it’s also fully customable. So, they
can’t be shown in any cut scenes (there are ones at the beginning and at the
end of career, but it hardly counts as a “story”). You can play as the old
characters too (and a few celebrities) but the game doesn’t seem to care for
them and just makes the main focus your blank slate. And that’s where my main
problem is: there is no “personality” to this game. There are a few other
aspects to it, but basically it becomes “play the songs and move on”. It’s just
so disappointing when the previous game (the one that got me into the whole music
rhythm genre) did it so well.
Personally, I think Guitar Hero: World Tour was
a misstep at a horrible time for the series. At the inevitable turning point,
Activision published something that failed to really charm anyone. It also
didn’t help that there were numerous issues with the instruments that came with
it and a lot of compatibility problems with other instruments that made you
rely on them. However, Guitar Hero: World Tour isn’t a bad game, as it does build on the game play
mechanics that came before it and provides more songs for people to rock out to
(though personally, I’m not wowed by the selection). It also had all of the
original recordings for the songs used, which they managed to do before Rock
Band. This isn’t a bad game, but by far
failed to live up to what was required from it. I give Guitar Hero: World Tour
for the Nintendo Wii 7 levels out of 10.
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