Hands-on review: Guitar Hero World Tour

Activision has at last responded to the Rock Band juggernaut with Guitar Hero World Tour, finally expanding the sizzling guitar action of the long-running original Guitar Hero series into the full, four-player gaming experience, adding drums and vocals to the mix.

I've been playing the new game for several days now, and picking a favorite -- Rock Band or GHWT -- is going to be tough. There are pros and cons of both, and they're both worthy rhythm titles. Here are some thoughts that, I hope, will help you decide which one you want to drop almost $200 on.

Let's start with the instruments and the specific gameplay for each.

Guitar Hero has always had the better guitars, and again the World Tour axe doesn't disappoint, raising the quality bar once again. It's larger, has a bigger strum bar, and a huge whammy bar that's easy to reach. Pros will love the new star power activator located right where your palm hits the base of the guitar. No more "going up" or fumbling for the back button (though raising the neck is still an option). The new addition is the slider, located below the standard fret buttons. You're supposed to be able to use this touch-sensitive pad to be able to hit certain notes by just tapping, but it's hard to find the right button in a pitch and there's little warning when these notes come up. Luckily using the pad is optional; I quickly went back to the regular buttons.

Drums: You'll notice you have six strike zones now: Three pads, bass pedal, and two raised cymbals. This really changes the feel of drumming, as you're reaching all over the place to hit notes, and it takes a lot of getting used to in retraining your body that yellow notes are now up, not one pad to the right. This is easier to do than it sounds, and the kit is generally well-designed (and wireless). The pads, however, aren't sensitive enough, especially the cymbals, sometimes requiring you to wail away on them to register. "Accent notes" earn you extra points at certain points in the song -- but that means you actually have to hit them even harder, which requires slamming the whole stick down as hard as you possibly can. Also note that you can use your Rock Band drums or the Ion Drum Rocker with this game -- the orange zone vanishes when you use them and you're back to the standard five-zone setup.

Bass is a lot like lead guitar, with the new addition of a purple no-fret note: You strum while holding down no frets to hit it, adding a fun twist to what can otherwise be a somewhat boring instrument, and while it's usually an easy change, when the line gets going fast, it can get a little tricky.

Vocals are much like they are in Rock Band, though you get "freestyle" sections for earning extra points, and the game seems to pay closer attention to your timing than it does on Rock Band, where you can usually sing anything as long as you're in key.

Now on to the meta-game.

There are both single-instrument and band modes, but they're largely the same (you need at least two people to play in a band). You work through a series of gigs (single songs can only be chosen in quickplay mode), each with a number of songs to be played. There's a mystery encore at the end of each gig, and then another gig or two opens up, going on and on until you've exhausted all the music. (Speaking of which, you'll find a shocking number of duplicate songs on the GHWT set list vs. Rock Band 2. I'm sick of playing "Float On" as it is, and here we go again...) Career mode is a much simpler and less exciting progression than you get with Rock Band, but the good news is that you're repeating songs much less often.

The single-player modes look and play a lot like the single-player Guitar Hero games, but the full band experience has some serious layout issues. Put simply, it's hard to tell at a glance how well you're doing, whether your bandmates are having trouble, and if you have enough star power to activate (star power goes into a communal well now, which is both good and bad). The upshot is that players often find themselves confused mid-song, and since there's no "save him!" system in Guitar Hero, if one player bombs out, the song is over.

Overall GHWT is a more casual game than Rock Band, more suitable for parties and pick-up gaming than the driven, we-gotta-win-a-jet experience of Rock Band. Both games obviously have their place, and a lot will come down to two things: Which set list you prefer (here they are: GHWT, Rock Band 2), and whether you want to make your own tracks with the GHWT GH Tunes system. I downloaded a homebrew version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" the other day that was pretty cool, though a bit cheesy since it's all synthesizers. No way I would spend the effort to make my own tracks but I deeply admire the dedication of those that have done so.