Guitar Hero: World Tour (Xbox 360)

Running about a year behind Rock Band, the Guitar Hero franchise has now entered the realm of the full-band music game. And, while the game is good, the difference between this and Rock Band 2 is striking. While the Rock Band games take a somewhat more serious approach to the game, with a cleaner, simpler graphical style, Guitar Hero continues in the goofy, cartoonish tradition set forth by its predecessors.

The best thing about this is they’ve toned down the difficulty a bit. Hard on GHWT is actually equivalent to hard on Rock Band now, not Expert. The songs, overall, seem to be charted better than Guitar Hero 3’s sometimes random explosions of notes. And they’ve even made bass interesting by adding open notes (strumming without pressing any of the fret buttons). They’ve also made the guitar duels with scary Viking Zakk Wylde and right-wing has-been Ted Nugent much less annoying than the duels in GH3.

The bad thing is they’ve barely updated the tour mode from previous games. The only difference is rather than picking one song and having an encore at the end of each tier of songs, you instead pick from two to five-song setlists and most (but not all) of them have encores at the end. And that’s it. You either do that or play a setlist you pick. There’s no variation in the setlists once you’ve played through them, no random setlists, no challenges like Rock Band 2 has. Oh yeah, and if you’re an anti-corporate type, you will hate the constant product placement.

As far as the music selection goes, they’ve mercifully reduced the number of crappy metal songs in favor of more classic rock, modern rock and some indie. It’s unfortunate that a lot of the songs overlap with Rock Band 2, but I guess it’s hard to help that when you’re developing your games simultaneously.

Overall, there’s nothing bad about GHWT – it’s actually a quite good, if somewhat basic, music rhythm game – but when you compare it to the brilliance that is Rock Band 2, it comes up short.

4 out of 5