It appears that despite many people having their hands on the game, the ever-present review embargo appears to be stopping most from commenting so far, but IGN appears to have been the first of the game enthusiast sites to get a review of Guitar Hero World Tour posted.
I don’t go by scores personally, I advise you to read the full review. It’s only one opinion so far, but to me, there are a couple of elements that make it sound like Neversoft may have missed some fairly important points again. By far the most important thing I saw in this review is that in ‘band mode’, it only takes one person failing to immediately bomb everyone out of the song. They say there’s no option to ’save’ people like in Rock Band 1, and of course Rock Band 2 added ‘no fail mode’ which I can see us turning on, particularly in party mode. It simply sucks for everyone when the whole song fails in multiplayer because one person gets into trouble - the person failing feels bad, and everyone else gets their play interrupted - much better just to get a crappy score at the end (in practice in RB1 you can’t get less than about 70% because any less than that and you’d have failed beyond the ability for others to save you). Harmonix listened to the fans on this for RB2 - and since RB1 has been out for a year I would have expected GHWT to learn from this too and include RB2’s no fail mode, but in fact it doesn’t seem to even equal RB1 since you can’t ’save’ others. Quite an odd decision - but then the GH3 designers somehow thought boss battles were cool too.
One thing I do like though is that you can activate star power when you want with the microphone (not sure about the drums). When it comes to ’saving’ people this is an issue in RB1 - although the no fail mode will get rid of it.
Unsurprisingly there are some people complaining in forums about instrument failures already - drum pads not working properly, guitar slide bars being erratic, that kind of thing. I’m not really sure why people thought GHWT’s peripherals would be immune to the same teething problems RB’s had - even though Red Octane have a large amount of experience, anything new always has a few rough edges, especially when you’re talking about mass production. It’s way too early to tell if this is just a small proportion or a larger pattern but it’s not really news - it would have only been news if things had gone perfectly.
So, not a great start on the review front for GHWT; I can’t say I’m that surprised considering the disappointing GH3, but we’ll see as the review embargo lifts what other people thought. I have to say that embargoing reviews until after the release date of a product is a little suspect.
[edit]Well, a few more reviews are in now and it appears IGN was on the lowest end of the scale so far. Still, the text of every review still seems to indicate that the band mode / party play is the weak point, due to the instant-fail, clunky interface layout and less interesting band career mode. So, it looks like it depends on your play style - as someone who never really plays these music games alone (unless I’m practicing), co-op and party play are the #1 priority, so weakness in this area is a turn off for me (just like it was in the horribly broken GH3 co-op play, although this doesn’t sound as bad). Although the extra songs would be nice, on balance I think I’ll save my money and spend it on RB DLC instead. Those who haven’t taken the RB plunge yet might be good to get the hardware though, assuming the failures reported so far aren’t systemic.
October 26th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Randomly found your page while searching for GHWT reviews (interesting enough, the Google search term I used this time was “GHWT sucks”). Just wanted to let you know that in addition to IGN, 1UP and Askmen also have reviews up.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:37 am
I play both RB and GH (aerosmith, sigh, and 3) on WII. While reading your (and others) musings about them I always ask myself “why I am the only one that finds GH guitar tracks much better than RB ones?” It simply feels more “guitar” to me. You said you’v started studying guitar.. what do you think?
October 27th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
As I’ve said before, I find RB tracks more fun, and more ‘accurate’. GH3 tracks added extra notes where there were none in the score, or made the combinations more complex than they would be in reality to add to the ‘challenge’. That just sucked the immersion out of it for me, I felt like I was trying to beat a button-mashing game rather than pretending to play an instrument.
GH3 fans say that some RB tracks are too easy / boring, but IMO that just reflects the difficulty of the actual song itself, which is how it should be. Some people want a signature track in a game and then add all sorts of arbitrary fiddly stuff to it to make it more difficult, but I prefer the ‘feel’ to be right above everything else.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
So are you saying that you didn’t just take the first available opportunity to post a (mainly) negative post about GHWT? Addone’s comment amused me somewhat, maybe Google is somehow attuned to your subconcious?
I note that 1Up has reviewed it and given it a A- and that Eurogamer (whom I often trust) have also reviewed it and given it a 9/10. Then again, I see that you have just edited your post to account for this. Like you, I rarely go by scores anymore, I tend to know what I like and damn the rest of the world. As such, unlike you, I have enjoyed GH3 (but admit that there are a few problems with it) and as such, had little reason to doubt that GHWT would like be very much like GH3, but with improvements (which is fine in my book).
I can appreciate your comments, especially in regards to the lack of “saving” in GHWT, but to be frank, that’s no biggy for me. I’ll likely be playing it mainly by myself, but occassionally with Roz or Elliot if I can interest them (Elliot wants to try drums). I would have liked the benefit of a no fail option, but it certainly wouldn’t stop me from buying the game.
It is also a shame that there have been some reports of faulty instruments, but like you say, it’s the nature of the beast. Be it Rock Band or Guitar Hero, there are bound to be some faulty instruments out there and the people who get them are bound to be vocal about it. I’ll just cross my fingers and hope that mine is okay. I still much prefer the look of the GHWT instruments…
I’m still 100% going to get GHWT over RB, for numerous reasons that you are already aware of, but at the same time, it’s still likely that I’ll pick up RB or RB2 idc in addition to GHWT.
Plus, only GHWT has ….. Band on the Run
October 27th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
No, IGN was really the only review up when I posted this yesterday. I checked 1UP among all the other main sites and their’s wasn’t online - so it was accurate at the time of posting, AddOne’s comment was 5-6 hours later. As you can see, I updated it first thing once more were available. And in any case, the reviews all say generally the same thing, despite the score variants (hence why I ignore scores) ie good but group play isn’t as good as Rock Band.
Group play is the #1 feature for me, 2-player is usually the minimum, so that’s my primary reason for not bothering with it even though I could just buy the game. It was also the major reason GH3 was a massive let-down - co-op was broken beyond repair compared to GH2, in addition to the stupid difficulty wall in Hard mode. I have more than enough tracks to choose from on RB (300 and counting) and nothing on GHWT (for me) that justifies having to switch discs and have less fun co-op.
The drums do look good though, although some people complain about the kick pedal moving around too much, and some complain of problems with the red pad and cymbals. It sounds like if you have a working set and your floor isn’t too springy they’re good though, certainly much better than RB1 drums (unmodded).
October 28th, 2008 at 1:40 am
I just picked up GHWT yesterday, and so far seems pretty solid. I’m not too sure about the band mode being an issue for failing immediately - my 3 year old daughter was playing the drums (just banging around randomly mostly) on easy mode and we had no problems passing any songs
I can’t comment on any hardware failure yet, everything seems to be working as expected so far. The only issue I have, and I haven’t really bothered reading why yet, but the instruments (drums and guitar) each use a USB wireless dongle and not the built in bluetooth. hmm. At least the guitar dongle has a USB hub build in so two other things can be plugged in still.
October 28th, 2008 at 1:41 am
Oh, I should mention I guess that this was for PS3.
October 29th, 2008 at 8:21 am
The problem with instant fail isn’t the difficulty level, really - it’s that regular people like to play at a level that’s challenging to them but at the same time failing the entire band (ending the play session) sucks. A lack of saving / no-fail mode means that it’s difficult to challenge yourself without risking spoiling everyone else’s fun. Different songs have different difficulties too, so if you pick a Hard song and find it’s a tricky one, it sucks to fail out the band. It’s much better just to sheepishly have a lowish score at the end than for everyone to be bombed out.
My opinion is that you only really notice these nuances if you’ve played these types of game a lot. I know some people who never played GH2 co-op much and didn’t know what the fuss was about with people complaining about GH3. I’m sure people who only played GH3 will find GHWT just fine, but I’m pretty sure I’d find the co-op weaknesses annoying after playing RB a lot.
November 17th, 2008 at 12:42 am
I own ghwt on ps3 and find band play not an issue i played through a song on hard on drums and only hit 50% of notes yet the band did not fail, so i cant really see the problem also if any instrument gets star power anyone in band can use it… the only nuisance i find is that the wired mic and all the dongle that are plugged into ps3 but that is minor issue, i have yet to find major faults with drum etc, except i find that positioning the cymbols correctly will prevent them from double hitting, being too sensitive, not sensitive enough but as activision has released tuning kit i think that issue should be ironed out