A giant leap forward takes a big step back.

Author's Rating:

Pros: Newly added drums and vocals, indepth rock star creator, download songs by other players

Cons: Considerably easier than previous titles, music studio with a poor interface

The Bottom Line: 
If you want some new songs to play then you will enjoy this game.  If you're looking for a challenge or to make music, this will leave you disappointed.

Author's Review
I had played Guitar Hero 1-3 as well as it's competitor, Rock Band many times.  Though I enjoyed Rock Band for it's drums, I was much fonder of Guitar Hero's guitar.  Needless to say, when I heard Guitar Hero was coming out with a full band game, I was quite intrigued and made sure I had a good two hundred dollars set aside for the purchase of the complete band package.

When it came out and I finally got a unit that actually worked right, I was quite ecstatic to play the game not only for the new songs that were sure to be even more challenging than Guitar Hero III, but I also was very interested in the series's newest addition, the music studio where you can create your own songs then play them in-game.  Here is a break down of what this product has to offer.

The game has the same basis as the previous Guitar Heros, being you play through songs by striking the right notes as they pass the line.  You can play as guitar, bass guitar, drums, or vocals.  You can do this on various difficulties, these being expert, hard, medium, easy, and the newly added, beginner.  Completion of the game does not depend on what difficulty you have it set on, therefore you can play through the entire career mode on beginner and still receive the same rewards as playing on expert.

Career mode is updated from previous versions and is now more similar to Rock Band's career mode in that you choose gigs to play.  The farther you get, the more gigs you will be able to choose from and the more songs each gig will contain.  Of course the songs generally get harder gig by gig also.  The order the songs are arranged in a gig are based upon what instrument your using, so if you complete an easy guitar song on the first gig, it could be the hardest song on vocals on the final gig.  When you complete gigs you will earn cash that you can spend on new instruments or clothing, or you can also earn new equipment for your instruments such as new guitar pick-ups, or new drum sticks.  Unfortunately, these additions to your instrument serve only a visual purpose and do not actually enhance your sound or performance in any way.

Quickplay, though basically the same, has a couple of minor additions.  You can now choose up to five songs at once and play them as a gig straight through with no interruptions.  Another minor detail is the ability to sort through songs by career, song, artist and alphabet.

One of the well done, new aspects to the series is the rock star creator.  It allows you to shape every feature of your rock star's face and some details are barely noticeable, however it has enough depth that it allows you to get the look you truly want.  It also has a system where you can completely customize tattoos for your rock star by adding layers on layers and placing them in the exact spot you want them(excluding above the neck and below the waist).  With this feature it is essentially possible to have a rock star with sleeves of tattoos   There's also a descent amount of clothing and other apparel, however I was expecting much, much more than there is since it encourages so much variety in creating your rock star and giving him or her tattoos.

In addition to this you can use the various equipment earned in career to create your own instrument.  You can choose from different styles of guitar bodies and drums, as well as add your own imagery using the same system used to create tattoos.  You can choose from a few different microphones also, though there's basically no customization for vocals.

The music studio is where the game has the greatest potential, but it will only leave you disappointed.  Prior to the game's release, the creators described the studio as similar to the "Garage Band" software.  I have used Garage Band before and found it relatively easy to use and even easier to navigate.  Guitar Hero's recording studio is the exact opposite.  That is, it's not too easy to use and downright frustrating to navigate through.  You enter the studio and can either choose to do live recording, use the highly anticipated GHMix, or use GHTunes to download songs on xbox live that others have created  When choosing the live recording or GHMix you can choose a pre-made bassline or drumbeat, or both.  The live recording studio lets you either record yourself playing live, or just mess around freely on guitar, bass, drums(especially fun in my opinion), and vocals, though unlike guitar, drums, and bass, you cannot record vocals.  The guitar has many different effects to choose from in live recording, though most of them sound the same.  The drums also come with a good amount of drumkits, however there are a few that only make noises and couldn't be used to make actual beats.  As for the bass, you can only use the single generic bass sound provided.  Also, the maximum length your song can be is 3 minutes long, though to me this shouldn't be too big of a deterrent.  The real deterrent comes when you realize that the recording studio is not as user friendly to the average person as the creators had intended it to be.  To make a remotely descent song you would have to spend quite a bit of time, most of which you will be scrolling back and forth to various points in your song in GHMix.  GHMix is supposed to be the application that allows you to really polish your songs and arrange various live recordings as you see fit and it's supposed to be used with ease.  I've only used it with monotony and frustration.  One flaw is that when you record something, it's quite difficult to start playing the second you hit that record button, therefore there will be a pause before you actually start the song, taking time off your already limited 3 minutes.  GHMix SHOULD be the answer for this as it has an option to push all notes forward in a song, but where all logic evades is the inability to push notes BACK.  Also, instead of having a convenient scroll bar or something similar, if you need to go to a certain point in your song to edit it, you only have two buttons that say "skip forward" or "skip backward."  Each time you skip forward or backward it barely moves in that direction.  Thus, if you have a 3 minute song, you're probably going to spend 3 minutes scrolling through all of it.  There is a skip to beginning button however, but no skip to end button.  In short, unless you're already really skilled in producing music, chances are you will never get what you want out of the recording studio.  All I use it for now is going crazy on the drums.

Since I let out some gripes regarding the recording studio I feel I should let out the rest regarding the game as a whole.  First of all I don't have anything against the song list, there's many songs I was excited about seeing on Guitar Hero, my complaint is that the songs, in regard to previous guitar heros are much easier.  If you're wanting to buy this because you're looking for the pride of beating more insane Dragon Force type songs, you will be in for a major let down.  Guitar Hero III is without a doubt the most difficult Guitar Hero yet, and World Tour does not even come close.  The most difficult song on guitar on the game is Satch Boogie by Joe Satriani which can be difficult, but it's still easy in comparison to something like Dragon Force.  The game seems to have many songs that are generally fun to play, but they're incredibly easy.  There's only a handful of songs on all instruments that present an actual challenge to the experienced Guitar Hero guru.  If you're new to Guitar Hero however, you might find it more enjoyable in this aspect, being that the game as a whole is easier and if you simply cannot play through a song whatsoever, there's always the ridiculously easy beginner mode which only requires you to strum at the right time.

If you're wanting to buy the new guitar and drumset that goes with the game, I wouldn't object against it as the new drums are much more realistic and all around more fun to play than Rock Band's drums and the new guitar is a major improvement from the clumsy Guitar Hero III model, though the new touch pad feature is virtually useless as it will either not work correctly or it will just mess you up more than playing normally.  One major issue with the drums that I don't know how the creators missed is that the foot pedal is connected in no way to the base of the drum set like the Rock Band drums.  This means as you progress to more and more difficult songs on drums, the foot pedal is going to move around more and more.  From my experience it would slide straight out of reach of my foot altogether or gradually turn more and more in one direction so that eventually I'd be playing in an awkward position that would frequently cause me to fail songs when I'd attempt to correct it.  I've now used rubber bands to fix the pedal to the base of the stand, though it's somewhat aggravating I had to do that in the first place.