Rocking, Rollicking Review

Photo by Dan4th

I've mentioned previously that Leen and I bought our household Christmas present a little early this year - Guitar Hero: World Tour.

And dudes? I haven't been this satisfied with a video game purchase since our first magical week with the Wii.

For those about to rock, the game allows up to four people to play together in an awesome mega-band. It includes a corded mic, a wireless guitar controller and a wireless drum kit. All are good. The guitar is smaller than the instrument on which it is based but the drums are an impressive apparatus. I still have nowhere to store these things.

As we bought in via the Xbox 360, the instruments are compatible with both World Tour and RockBand. With a little Google-Fu we discovered that World Tour had the best hunks of plastic, so we picked that up and bought the Rock Band disc.

Even though the games were released simultaneously in Australia, Rock Band is over a year old in the US and was only released here when competition rolled in. That encouraged me to give most of my money to the other guys as a small protest.

The instruments are very good. the drum kit hiccups occasionally but having seen the Rock Band stuff in the store, I'm confident we've made the right call. In the interest of full disclosure, our guitar is a little busted and will only register strumming upwards. This is due to multiple droppings rather than an inherent fault, but given the rowdy nature of its intended use, it'd be nice if it was made of sterner stuff. Another small irritation is that, while the game allows four players [vocals, guitar, bass and drums], it comes with only one guitar, and I can't for the life of me find a store that sells a second guitar controller itself.


The game is just crazy fun. Whenever I play, even when belting out sub-par vocals to Metallica songs, I quickly check to see if I'm self-conscious or embarrassed, and find that I am not. Honestly, when you can get a whole band together, it's pure fun.

This really is a party game. I've played on the guitar by myself and why there's still entertainment there, it just isn't the same.
As a party game, there's some things it does really well and some old traps it falls into. I'm a huge fan of each player being able to set their own difficulty level, so experts and newcomers can rock together without anyone getting left behind. However, when your game is best experienced in party formation, can we please stop forcing players to first unlock everything in the single player modes? I resorted to a cheat I found online to unlock the Rock Band roster, because we want to play songs dammit, not win.

So if you're worried that this game is lame or embarrassing or whatever, don't be, because it's more fun than it has any right to be.