Guitar Hero World Tour Image
Metascore
85

Generally favorable reviews - based on 67 Critic Reviews What's this?

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6.3

Mixed or average reviews- based on 182 Ratings

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  • Summary: Guitar Hero World Tour marries Guitar Hero's guitar gameplay, with a cooperative band experience that combines the most advanced wireless instruments with revolutionary new online and offline gameplay modes. The game features a slick newly redesigned guitar, a genuine electronic drum kit andGuitar Hero World Tour marries Guitar Hero's guitar gameplay, with a cooperative band experience that combines the most advanced wireless instruments with revolutionary new online and offline gameplay modes. The game features a slick newly redesigned guitar, a genuine electronic drum kit and a microphone, as well as an innovative Music Studio music creator that lets players compose, record, edit and share their own rock and roll anthems, along with online Band Career and 8-player "Battle of the Bands." Guitar Hero World Tour is comprised entirely of master recordings from some of the greatest classic and modern rock bands of all-time including Ozzy Osbourne, Van Halen, Linkin Park, The Eagles, Sublime and many more. Additionally, the game offers significantly more localized downloadable music than ever before on all of the next-generation consoles. Budding rock stars are also given creative license to fully customize everything from their characters’ appearance and instruments to their band’s logo and album covers. Featuring three drum pads, two raised cymbals and a bass kick pedal, the drum controller combines larger and quieter, velocity-sensitive drum heads with soft rubber construction to deliver authentic bounce back and is easy to set up, move, break down and store. Virtual musicians can live out their rock and roll fantasies by playing either a single instrument, or any combination of instruments, in addition to the full band experience. Guitar Hero World Tour introduces Battle of the Bands mode which allows eight players to join online and challenge each other band-to-band to determine who is the best of the best. In the Band modes, up to four players can jam together, online or off, as they progress through the game, and in single-player Career Mode, players can jam on any of the instruments in branching venue progression enabling them to rock out in the order of their choice. The game's Music Studio lets players express their musical creativity by giving them access to a full compliment of tools to create digital music from scratch, utilizing all of the instruments, and then play their compositions in the game. Music creators can share their recordings with their friends online through GHTunes where other gamers can download their unique compositions and play them. [Activision] Expand
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Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 63 out of 67
  2. Negative: 0 out of 67
  1. games(TM)
    90
    With its sense of fun, complex tools, and balance of enjoyment and depth, World Tour contains the ability to both teach and entertain. [Dec 2008, p.94]
  2. 90
    As a band game, the unpolished, unintuitive feel of the interface may likely send many players back to "Rock Band" as their party game of choice – now that Guitar Hero World Tour has delivered its opening number, we'll have to see if it can deliver a superior encore.
  3. World Tour is a big leap in content and polish over last year’s game, but we’re disappointed by a few unsatisfying creative calls. The extended song endings aren’t always enhancements, the unlockable gear doesn’t match the effort put forth to earn it, and we prefer Rock Band 2’s looser career-unlock structure. Most of all, Rock Band 2 simply feels more musical and organic; we get the suspicion that some World Tour songs had notes added to their charts simply to make them trickier, and not because the music suggested it.
  4. The anticipation for Guitar Hero World Tour was palpable, and to see the party turn South the way it did was a bit concerning.
  5. While the music is great, the key feature of being able to create your own and share is simply just too confusing and uneasy to use, which is a shame.
  6. It's not as polished compared to Rock Band 2 but it's not a bad game.

See all 67 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 14 out of 46
  2. Negative: 16 out of 46
  1. StevenH
    Jan 2, 2009
    10
    Very excellent game, Only reason I see low votes is because of people who say it has the same songs as Rock Band 2, but in my opinion, theVery excellent game, Only reason I see low votes is because of people who say it has the same songs as Rock Band 2, but in my opinion, the better songs are on Guitar Hero, then on Rock Band, plus... new intro to play styles for each instrument was nice, gives a variety, the drums are excellent, the songs are not impossibly hard, Unlike Rock Band 2s starting boring songs, Guitar Hero starts it off with a bang, and ends it with a bang. Character Customization is excellent, compared to RB2, and you can custom your own music instruments! Even make your own song, its very nice. Loved the music, gameplay, even the 4 seconds you get when you pause, to be back on track, they thought of everything you need to surpass RB2. Few more metal songs would of been nice, but still you can always add downloads on xbox market. Love the calibrate thing, keeps people from complaining, I see no flaws, no lagg, just a big competition for RB2. Guitar Hero makers, keep it up, you just need to release your next game before RockBand does! lol... Expand
  2. MichaelBrooke
    Dec 29, 2008
    9
    In my opinion, this game has been overly criticized for silly, mostly inconsequential reasons. The game has a great soundtrack and is anIn my opinion, this game has been overly criticized for silly, mostly inconsequential reasons. The game has a great soundtrack and is an extremely fun and satisfying rhythm/music game. The instruments are far superior (except the microphone) to RB 2's instruments in my opinion. It is a huge improvement to G.H. 3 and i highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys this sort of game. Plus, it has it's own music creator which is great once you've got used to it. A must buy. Expand
  3. JimboHutch
    Dec 21, 2008
    8
    I've had this since release day and have waited to really give it a good chance before reviewing. Overall, its a pretty solid game. ItI've had this since release day and have waited to really give it a good chance before reviewing. Overall, its a pretty solid game. It has a lot of innovations to keep you learning new things on the guitar, such as (realistically) holds that include strums at the same time, and the tap sections to provide a new but optional challenge. Arguably, the drum kit is very good once you've ordered the USB-MIDI adapter so you can fix the sensitivity (its free). Couple issues with the drums themselves - the legs seem near impossible to take apart and the kick pedal's velcro won't stick to some people's carpet. When it does stick, its great, but on the one in my home it doesn't and it just moves around too much if you play heel-up. Couple gripes: they take each drum literally, so you spend a lot of time on the left-hand side of the drum kit while barely using the right. Even if in real life a drummer may have two snare drums, here its always grouped into the red drum on the kit. Next, the drum audio, while more reactive than Rock Band's (the original at least), still isn't as reactive as I would like, and if you mess up mid-way through a fill, the audio for the drums clearly keep going even though you stopped hitting the drums. Speaking of audio, I dont know why they used a live recording for one of Hendrix's songs, because you can hear the other instruments come through other channels. So when you mess up it just gets quieter but you still hear the audio. I ended up swapping out my original guitar that came with the band kit, which lost its downstrum functionality after a few days, with a new one, only to have the new one have a squeaky strum bar. Fortunately, I was able to resolve that issue easily with WD-40, a q-tip, a paper towel, and 7 minutes. The mic works ok, on normal its fairly easy to get right if you try, on hard you start seeing issues on certain songs. For example, some songs seem to have a small amount of lag for when the comet moves (up to half a second), and also the mic simply cannot detect low sounds. If you use a deeper octave and try to hit the lower notes, it just freezes in place. If you switch to a higher octave, it works fine. The real issue is that several songs have the singer use that lower octave, so it ends up being a frustrating experience. Its not like I'm talking about Isaac Hayes low here either. Likewise, the note scales for singing seems to change from song to song. So the middle note for one song seems to be different on another. This isn't so bad except that the high/low gets set to some position that results in going slightly lower changing the comet to a high, and going higher changing it to low, when the comet isn't even near the edge of the highway. People who have used guitar tuners will sympathize with this frustration. Finally, "talky" parts are basically just a matter of making some sort of noise during their presence, which means you could stick a fan up to it and get full points. The music studio is not worth buying this for it. Its certainly impressive at times, but has too many limitations that seem entirely unnecessary. An example is that hammer-ons and pull-offs are automatic to the harmony guitar, and the harmony guitar can only do chords. The lead guitar can do hammer-ons/pull-offs at whatever interval it wants, but it can't do chords at all. Likewise, the bass instrument sounds nothing like bass. It sounds exactly like the MIDI "slap bass" instrument. Younger children may enjoy making their own songs but I can't imagine that many adults appreciating it until the music sounds realistic. Switching back to songs in general, the sound channels, while a huge improvement over guitar hero 3, still sometimes picks out the very faint guitar to do the notes for when there is another guitar dominating volume-wise. Finally, the difficulty isn't tuned very well on the easier settings. I was doing hard drums after about 2 hours despite having little experience with rock band beforehand. Then I found those too easy and repetitive, so I switched to expert, of which both the note chart and the crowd's tolerance for errors become significantly harder. Mainly the big issue is that on lower difficulties there is too much repetition. One more thing, when doing band-play, you only get songs that the band leader has unlocked. But the thing is, its a real pain to have the profiles switch instruments, and for every profile you have signed in the game has to keep "checking hard disk" for each person. Ok, so as negative as that sounds, this is still a very decent game. The song list is very strong and has a good variety, although it suffers from "right artist wrong song" at times, or how some songs like stranglehold are just too long for their own good. Unlike Rock Band's psychedelic eye-sore, Guitar Hero still has those easy to read note runways. The drum kit is a blast to use and significantly more realistic. There is plenty of challenge and a decent song difficulty gradient. Most songs work just fine on the mic, and the freestyle sections are a lot better than those stupid "tambourine" sections of Rock Band. The framerate is better than Rock Band 2. The drums, after tuning, require less effort than Rock Band 2. The kick pedal wont snap in half for no good reason. The band play is more challenging than Rock Band. Everything else pretty much works like you'd hope/expect it to. Finally, the DLC is lacking, but the classic rock pack and "No Rain" by blind melon aren't bad additions. There's also metallica's latest album and new additions seemingly every week, but alas it seems they constantly pull out songs that never really made it big even if its from popular artists. I have yet to play an online game. When I tried it took too long to find a game, after multiple tries I gave up. Honestly, considering there are leaderboards, I dont see the point anyways. Expand
  4. Allen
    Oct 26, 2008
    5
    Guitar: Extended Sustains: cool in theory/semifun in actuality. Half the time one of these show up you don't even realize it and Guitar: Extended Sustains: cool in theory/semifun in actuality. Half the time one of these show up you don't even realize it and you'll end up letting go of the fret too early so you lose a lot of points. Solo Sequences: I didn't have access to a touch pad so I had to play these on a RB1 Strat. You do not have to strum and it seems like the timing window is a lot looser during these sequences. Overall: pretty much the same loose window as GH3 with a tighter HO/PO window. Bass: Open note strums: Again cool in theory/semi fun in acutality. Some of the songs are charted for these pretty well and it adds an extra bit of difficulty to the game for a typically "boring" instrument. One weird thing I've noticed is the fact that you can HO/PO these open note strums. How this makes any sense I have no idea, but it's there. (check out Today on bass). If the note charts are bad these just become a mess. B.Y.O.B. is an example of this. It's just really awkward to read and you'll probably fail out because of it. Drums: (played on rb1 drums) Overall pretty good I guess. The solo sections where you can go freestyle for points are unnecessary and generally sound bad/screw with bandmates. Activating starpower is a pain as you have to hit yellow and blue together for a 33% chance of it activating starpower. You'll probably end up breaking streak trying to get it to work. Drum rolls (looks like a sustain on guitar) are different, but I'd probably rather have them charted than a random game of chance. Vocals: Overall feels like it was tacked on due to necessity. There are no options for adjusting sensitivity or volumes like you have in rockband. Have fun trying to match the vocals because you can't hear them! Sometimes you'll be changing pitches like crazy and the comet will stay dead center breaking your streak. There is no way to judge how well you did on a section other than seeing your combo meter go up afterwards. Xbox Live: Really bad overall, there are no ways to setup a private game. If you want to play with you're friend coop, you'll have to at least make an attempt to invite a pubby first. There is no way to moderate your game, so if that pubby does not want to leave you can't kick them. One huge oversight that they've made is forcing you to select your difficulty before a song is chosen. Even doing so requires you to check a submenu of a menu choice that you'll probably forget to check or overlook the first time you play, forcing you to play on medium. During the song selection you have no idea of what the host/roulette winner is picking. Also expect to play Beat It or Satch Boogie at least once when you play on live. Overall I give the game a 5.5/10. It had some neat ideas, but the entire presentation just falls flat. I might seem like a rockband fanboy but you can't just overlook a bunch of things that other games did correctly. Playing this game feels more like a chore than it is having fun. Expand
  5. DariusGreen
    Dec 13, 2008
    5
    Too many similar songs as Rock Band 2, the guitar peripheral strum bar sticks and is basically unusable (what happened to quality, my first GHToo many similar songs as Rock Band 2, the guitar peripheral strum bar sticks and is basically unusable (what happened to quality, my first GH guitar on the PS2 still works flawlessly?), and the drum kit was hot glued together, rather than soldered. Mine, like so many others, died on me after a few hours of game play. Getting an RMA processed through Activision is enough to make you want to kill someone. While there are some nice features, such as the way it tracks singing and the drumming imo is much better than Rock Band (and insanely fun until the pad breaks and you have to go through the hassle of replacing it), the overall feel of the game, track list, lack of importing prior GH games, contrived character customization, and poor quality of instruments are disappointing. For $189 you could get Left 4 Dead, Gears of War 2, Dead Spce and a 1600 point card for Bionic Commando and something else. Expand
  6. Brandon
    Oct 27, 2008
    4
    The single player guitar experience is great, but band play is wonky and confusing, which is disheartening, considering the game is The single player guitar experience is great, but band play is wonky and confusing, which is disheartening, considering the game is supposedly built around the band experience. Expand
  7. JaredC.
    Nov 1, 2008
    0
    This game is trash. The graphics are horrible, all the characters look like uncanny valley puppets. The animations do not match what you are This game is trash. The graphics are horrible, all the characters look like uncanny valley puppets. The animations do not match what you are doing in the song. The notes are too big and jammed together looking. Most of the drumkits are failing in one way or another. The singing gives no indication as to how well you are doing until you either fail or finally get through the song. The font of the lyrics is so small you won't be able to read them unless you have a huge TV. The way you unlock songs is annoying because you have to do a long series of 3 song venues and have to use a huge amount of ingame money to play the Tool venue. The music creator is severely limited despite it being more complicated than the average person will ever want to get into. Most of the preset sounds sound like crap. You have to either pick to play rhythm which is all chords or lead which is all leads, you cannot mix them for your own songs. I do not understand why Guitar Hero fans are so loyal to this brand. It's blind loyalty. Expand

See all 46 User Reviews