Guitar Hero World Tour Review

Anannya Sen’s Review

Rock out with your buttons

I gotta admit, I wasn't the one who reviewed the earlier Guitar Hero games. In fact, when it comes to these sorts of button press games, I'm never that good as the beat of the song gets confused with the pictures of which button to press as well as my brain trying to work out the timing ahead of schedule.

But Guitar Hero World Tour sidesteps all that in it's simplicity. It's not really that different from the earlier game on mobile, and you can read our review of that here. That got a gold award from my esteemed colleague, so what's changed in this version?

The graphics are a little better, but to be honest, it doesn't seem like that much. At least now there seems to be continous animation when playing the tracks. The tracks have doubled as well as each track has a guitar and drum section to complete. I found the drums a bit trickier as it's not the standard 3 buttons any more, instead you can press 7,8,9 or 0 for the drum part.

The sound is pretty similar with some tracks sounding decent but others like you may have purchased them from Jamba. It would have been nice to have some menu music rocking your handset or even some mp3 files. I'm not saying the music is bad in anyway, but it does sound like a ringtone. Still the choice of songs is a bit more varied from rock to pop to country. And there are 3 venues with 5 songs on each that you unlock as you go along.

It's weird, the pics on the media info we were sent seem to indicate a vs mode, maybe via bluetooth, but this certainly wasn't present on our demo version, and it's not stated on the game info blurb either. This is a real shame, as after a while you do want to try and pit your skills against a human opponent. Not that I really have any. Even on easy I found some of the tracks pretty hard and when I got to quick double button pressing (both keys at the same time) I didn't last too long. And this was on easy!! Still, the songs are short enough to keep you coming back for more. Oh, and a prize if you can mail us with the source of the quote up there in italics.

One new addition to this franchise is trophies. Everyone seems to have them these days and often they make the game more addictive. However, when the trophies almost all involve clocking songs on expert, then it's easy to be put off. How about trophies for a certain number of notes hit or a certain score? Nope, you have to really put your fingers to the test to earn the majority of them.

To be honest, not that much seems to have changed with Guitar Hero World Tour. There's the drum mode, but really this is just a slightly harder version of the guitar mode (imho). There are still 2 characters and you still hear the song in a reasonablish rendition of the actual melody. With slightly improved graphics and a variety of trophies to get, this seems more of a quick update rather than a whole new take on the genre. Worthwhile if you love these sorts of games, or don't have the original and want to check it out. Or, finally, if you have the fingers of the Flash!!