Rock Band? More like, "Hey check out our showoff guitarist!"
First things first. This is a Guitar Hero game and the guitar playing aspect is as superb as ever. The new gameplay addition of holding down certain buttons while strumming others at the same time is a good idea and mimics certain techniques of a real guitar. The transparent note sections are fun and make some solos easier than they would have been in any of the other games in the series. The touchpad is rather pointless since you can just tap the regular Guitar Hero buttons, but the new guitar feels great. The strum bar is longer, easier to hold on to, and star power is much easier to activate once you get used to not hitting "pause" every 10th time. Guitar Hero also went the Rock Band route by allowing players to continue adding starpower if it is already in use. It always baffled me as to why previous Guitar Hero games basically made players memorize which times are the best to use starpower to ensure the player can get as many phrases as possible. The two boss battles are surprisingly fun and not nearly as frustrating as the Lou battle from Guitar Hero 3 since all you have to do is outperform the boss instead of annoyingly being hexed with a "Lefty Flip."
Career Mode is a little different this time around as you can sort of choose which group of songs you want to tackle first. You can technically beat career mode by only playing 75% or so of the songs. The only complaint I have here is that I wish the encore song was revealed before you choose a group of songs since it would give the player more motivation to get to "Crazy Train" and suck it up when some unknown songs are on the gig list.
The bass parts of some songs can be a blast to play, especially with the newly implemented "open strum" which just means the player doesn't have to hold down a button while strumming. While this is a good idea, I feel as though a purple bar across the whole fretboard makes it harder to keep track of what notes you have to hit in a fast sequence like in "B.Y.O.B." I must say that some songs really do not have fun bass lines at all and this is worsened by the fact that a song like "Stranglehold" is almost 9 minutes long and is basically a guitar solo.
I have been using the Rock Band drumset with this game and it works great for the most part. The timing window is slightly larger than Rock Band's making it easier to perform drum rolls and to be consistent with songs that have extremely fast beats. I do feel that if Rock Band uses the same timing window as World Tour, it would be a nearly flawless system. There are a few complaints that I have about the World Tour drumming charts. When songs like "Run to the Hills" or "Move Along" come up in Rock Band, the creators were nice enough to switch the snare and ride cymbals with each other. If they had not done this, it would have been rather uncomfortable to keep your left arm much higher above your right arm in order to successfully hit the red (snare) pad without hitting drum sticks. Even though World Tour allows the Rock Band drumsets to work, it has this problem I just mentioned. Playing on Hard gets rid of this problem slightly, which is fine as this is only a minor complaint, but look up "Assassin" by Muse or "Everlong" by the Foo Fighters on youtube to see what I mean. Just make sure it is a video where the drummer is using the Rock Band drumset. The use of Star Power has improved in World Tour. Using it whenever you want is a little nicer than being forced to do a drum fill and hit the green cymbal. I find World Tour's method to be challenging and fun. Finding a spot in the beat where you can hit both blue and yellow at the same time teaches the player to keep rhythm instead of just wailing away on the drums to make the other band members lose track of the beat.
Singing is by FAR the weakest component of World Tour. I have been using the Rock Band usb microphone and it is almost impossible to get 90+ percent on expert. Playing on Medium seems to be the only way to "kind of" enjoy a song. Slightly breathing into the microphone in Rock Band never made the vocal cursor jump around. In this game, it does. It is much more difficult to sing certain parts of songs as the cursor just jumps way too much when I'm singing only one note. What other notes is this game picking up? I have never had this problem with Rock Band and this makes singing almost pointless in World Tour. Why is there a delay on a CRT TV while singing on World Tour? Once again, I have never noticed a delay with the microphone in Rock Band. Either the creators just flat out messed up with the PS2 version, or the Rock Band microphone just doesn't work that well with World Tour. The only way the player knows if the phrase was sung correctly is if the multiplier doesn't change. At least Rock Band had some kind of adjective to let you know how well you did after each line. A few adjectives to describe singing in World Tour? Abysmal, Broken, and Unsatisfying.
The game looks great for a PS2 game. I have no idea how old this console is now, but luckily these rhythm games have added a few more years to a dying system. The cost of the graphics really takes a toll with the loading times. Why does every member have to pick their character, instrument, and difficultly before a Quickplay song? Doesn't that completely defeat the purpose of Quickplay? To add more frustration and time wasted is the fact that the game has to load all the characters before you can play the song. I wouldn't mind if World Tour was stripped down like the PS2 version of Rock Band in this aspect to allow faster load times so everyone can have fun playing a song instead of waiting for all the custom band members to load. While the immense amount of customization for characters is impressive, it really is rather pointless. Each song takes about 30-40 seconds to load (Rock band takes probably 15-20). Saving progress is also a snore-inducer.
The quality of audio is also surprisingly average. The songs are way too quiet. Turning my TV up halfway to play at a comfortable volume doesn't make sense to me. I'm assuming the bitrate of the songs was toned down due to the 85 song setlist. Now about this setlist. It looks amazing on paper, but just because a song is great, does not make it fun to play. The Oasis song "Some Might Say" feels like it never ends while playing guitar, but is a good song in its own right. "Stranglehold" is non-stop fun on guitar, but if anyone else is playing another instrument alongside you, make sure they don't fall asleep. There are quite a few more examples, but it just goes to show that the setlist is really hit-or-miss. This could be a subjective point of view, but I don't think I'll meet anyone who'll say, "'What I've Done' is the best song in the game."
I'm sure some players will enjoy the Music Studio, but I would rather just use Fruity Loops and a real guitar. All in all, this is not a bad entry in the series at all, it just comes nowhere near the great experience I had with Rock Band. Hopefully Guitar Hero will continue in this direction but will focus more on making songs fun to play instead of easy to recognize.