Guitar Hero: World Tour

The Good
The Guitar Hero franchise is one of the best party games you are likely to find because everybody will instantly know what to do and in my experience almost everybody would like to try it at least once. If you pick the right song (like say for example: "Living on a Prayer" from Bon Jovi) you can also piss the hell out of the singer because everybody will sing along. This installment in the franchise is also perfect for parties due to a huge assortment of songs to choose from with a lot of different bands and genres.

This is also by far my favorite soundtrack in the franchise so far with songs from Bon Jovi, Ozzy Osbourne and Paramore just to name a few of them. I actually played through the single-player and multi-player career and that is quite an accomplishment when playing Guitar Hero games because most of the time it just get's too tedious to make it far. In this game with it was decent and you are allowed to skip quite a few gigs if the songs don't appeal to you and still unlock the finale.

The graphics have improved a lot since Guitar Hero II (the only other Guitar Hero game that I own) and now it looks pretty good. The background and stages look very nice and special effects during the show are very good. Lip-sync is also a big success and I swear it looked like the sound actually came from the singers.

I really like making my own characters when playing games and in this game it's amazing to see how many options there are and how straightforward it all is. Within ten minutes I was able to design a character that looked exactly like how I pictured it in my mind (a hard-rock version of Saria from Ocarina of Time) complete with her own instruments which I was also able to design and name with the same amount of options. This character was also playable in the Story mode and practice modes.

The Bad
The guitar is still as annoying as ever when you want to activate star power because you can go completely insane with the thing and it still won't register the movement. When you finally do activate star power you will most likely have made a mistake because it's hard to have a spasm-attack and correctly press the buttons at the same time as well. However it is made worse by the latest addition to the hardware, it's some kind of weird-ass part of the guitar that is beneath the buttons. The songs now have parts where you need to touch this area instead of the buttons. but switching between the two is very annoying and it just requires too much thinking while you are in the middle of playing a song.

The story is flimsy as hell, you start with a cinematic showing a young kid getting angry because he isn't the only one who plays a guitar and then it shows him as a grown-up getting angry at other guitar players at some kind of show and then nothing else. You are suddenly looking at a job board where you have to select which gigs you want to play and the story doesn't change at all, you just play at a lot of gigs and somehow still have to run back to the job-board to get a new one. It's pretty odd when you have been on-stage with Ozzy Osbourne and you still need to use a job board, you'd think they would ask you to play for them, not the other way around.

There are a lot of songs in here that are just pure mediocrity and some are very unbalanced (the guitarist is bored to death, but the bassist can't keep up), but the worst of them have to be the Spanish songs. Don't think I hate the Spanish, I really don't, but why in the world would you want to have Spanish songs in an English party game that requires people to do karaoke? I only have one Spanish friend and if he has to sing the entire evening then he will make himself both very unpopular and he might lose his voice as well.

The Bottom Line
This installment in the Guitar Hero franchise is decent, but far from perfect. The soundtrack is very good and you can customize a lot, but at the same time it is very flawed as well. If you want to have at least one copy of Guitar Hero then I will recommend this one if you have enough space to store two guitars and the drums (the microphone doesn't take up too much space) and if you are going to use it for parties a lot. Parties is where this game shines the most because the career mode is lacking an actual story and without anybody else around you will most likely get bored off this game is a day or two.