I think it would be fair to say my views towards Guitar Hero World Tour could be described as “prejudice” – I saw World Tour as an imitation to the amazingness of Rock Band. Yet, whilst to an extent I still hold that view, its somewhat lesser after playing World Tour quite a bit.
The initial impressions weren’t great, as you can read in our “initial impressions” here. But, as like much of the music on the game, World Tour is a grower. Its not brilliant, with some rather major flaws, but these are vastly outweighed by the good points. So, the good points. The music creation feature, whilst it is very, very complicated, is quite fun to mess around with, although to create anything that sounds anywhere near good, you’d have to spend way too long with it. Luckily, you can download tracks that have been made by people around the world that have done just that, and whilst most of them aren’t too near to perfect, its still fun to play “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”. Rock style!
The setlist is, well, a bit weird really. It tries to keep everyone happy, but in doing this the songlist is so random that that backfires on World Tour – its possible to be screaming along to Livin On A Prayer one minute, the Eagles the next and then topping it off with a bit of Coldplay.
Speaking of songlists, World Tour gets rid of the career mode play one song at a time that we saw in GHIII, and instead replaces it with a more Rock Bandy type structure – play a whole load of songs at once. Where it rather falls down though is that you don’t have the option (as you do in Rock Band) to play just one or two songs; you always have to play three, four or five. One time, we found ourselves playing the same setlist forty five minutes later after being “invited” to battle with some rock god, and after that play along with him. This is perhaps World Tour’s biggest downfall – the times when we just wanted to jam for five minutes we just couldn’t do in career mode.
DLC. Guitar Hero III was not even in the same universe when it came to DLC – Rock Band had still has songs being released every single week, and now there are over two hundred songs available to download, so World Tour has a lot to compete with. Activision have again taken the view that quality is better than quantity, with Jimi Hendrix, The Raconteurs and the Killers out there. With no commitment to release DLC every week, and Rock Band having some great tunes, World Tour still has something to work on.
World Tour is a definite improvement over GHIII, and if you’re looking for a rhythm game this Christmas, then should consider World Tour. Now, this is where it gets complicated. Rock Band 2 is out this week on the Xbox 360 (in the UK), so if you’ve got an Xbox, then get that, the Rock Band 2 instruments and then get just the game for World Tour, as the Rock Band (2) instruments are compatible with World Tour. If you’ve got a PS3, then this won’t be the case, and anyway, Xbox has platform exclusivity for a couple of months, so get World Tour. Its the same for the Wii – get World Tour.
Nometet.com says: 
+A definite improvement over GHIII
+Varied setlist
+You can make your own music
-Career dosen’t let you play one track at a time
-DLC still a way a way from Rock Band
-We experienced a couple of glitches – Guitar on beginner was lines across the screen (like the bass pedal for the drums), and the same applied to the drums – no notes, just bass
-Very expensive RRP (even more so than Rock Band when it was first released in the UK)
Xbox 360 version reviewed. Also available on PS3 (and PS2, Wii, but we cannot say what these versions will be like).
