Tour de Force

In Guitar Hero: World Tour, you not only play the songs, you write them too. The question is... do you want to?

Travis Barker looks ready to rock.

The mohawked drummer from bands like +44 and Blink-182 peers out from behind a mountain of toms and cymbals on the virtual Guitar Hero World Tour stage, making him the latest in a growing list of celebrities to lend both his music and his likeness to the powerhouse Guitar Hero franchise. Paramore vocalist Hayley Williams has also signed on, making them appropriate spokes-avatars for aspiring singers and drummers eager to jam with their guitar- and bass-playing friends.

And who wouldn’t want to be on this Tour? With more than 5 million copies of Guitar Hero II and III sold on Xbox 360 alone, Guitar Hero World Tour is poised to take the franchise in some ambitious new directions this year — everything from eight-player online matches to a music-creation suite that could completely change the rules about user-created content on Xbox Live, not to mention cloud the issue of where playing fake music ends and making real music begins. Lucky for us, Neversoft’s invited us over to play the game for ourselves.

You’ve Got the Touch

Most of the main points about Guitar Hero World Tour were covered in our July 2008 preview — four-player co-op as a band, both online and offline; 4-on-4 online showdowns dubbed Battle of the Bands; a deep character-creation tool and an instrument builder to match; and a crazy-deep DIY music-making mode. It’s not unfair to call it a response to Rock Band with a new challenge right back. Lists of features sure are nice — but how do the new instruments feel?

Like the wireless Les Paul that preceded it, the new Strat-shaped guitar features a detachable neck for easy portability and swappable faceplates for personal customization. (Activision has mentioned plans to take advantage of the faceplate functionality a bit more this time, but wouldn’t go into details.) Just about everything else, however, has been overhauled and redesigned. The unit itself is larger, for a sturdier, more realistic feel. We found the new, longer whammy bar easier to grab without looking; there’s less groping around for it. The strum lever features a flanged end like its Rock Band cousin and is wider than the old one by about a centimeter, which also makes it comfortable for adult hands to grip and widens the target zone of sloppy/active players. We found it to be quieter than the GHII and GHIII guitars, but the switch is still pleasantly clicky and tactile. We put it through its paces on “Feel the Pain” and “Everlong” with no surprises — it felt solid, responsive, and comfortable throughout.

Some of the controller’s best perks are the most subtle: RedOctane and Neversoft have cleverly disguised all the navigation controls so they look like the parts of a regular guitar. What appears to be a volume knob is actually a four-way D-pad, and the guide button sits atop it. The Start and Back buttons look like anchors for the guitar’s bridge, which is actually the Select button. Many expert players don’t like to tilt the guitar to trigger Star Power; now it’s as easy as leaning your wrist on the wide bar-shaped Select button. The end result of all this clever design is an aesthetically subtle controller that plays into the rock ’n’ roll fantasy a little further. Simply put, it looks less dorky.

On the other hand, it still has five big colored buttons on the neck, which are now joined by a track pad. Split into the five colored sections, this pad is used as both a secondary strum bar (just tap the pad to register a strum instead) and for new sliding sections in some songs. When you see a purple rope connecting gems in the note highway, use your picking hand to slide between the colored zones of the strum bar or tap each of those colors in sequence. It’s technically challenging to use the pad — it gave us trouble, in a positive, time-to-improve-your- skills kind of way — but it’s something you simply won’t be able to do with the older controllers. You can play these sections normally, but once you learn the sliding technique, it will arguably be easier to do it the new way. (The touch pad also gives you access to advanced functions in the music studio — more on that in a bit.)

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