by Max Benson

Created on: January 21, 2009

I was puzzled when I saw the name of the game on my receipt as "Guitar Hero World Tour" yet when I played the game it seemed more like Rock Band 2 and a half. In one tier of the game that had five songs, four of them were on either Rock Band or Rock Band 2. For a new 50 dollar game, this is just unacceptable. If I wanted just a couple more songs I would have downloaded an expansion pack online for Rock Band which is basically all Guitar Hero 4 is.

Music has been around since the dawn of time, their is no shortage of songs that involve a guitar, bass, drums and microphone. The songs on the first three Guitar Hero and first two Rock Bands are great, but that does not mean that I would like to pay more money just to play the same songs under a different name. Now the songs are tweaked a little bit, but its still the same song. In my mind, there is no excuse for making me pay for the same thing twice, Guitar Hero 4 should spend more time looking for good songs that were not in a previous game and make it better.

Nobody can blame Guitar Hero for adding a bass, drums, and microphone but that does not give them the right to completely copy Rock Band. Tour Mode? That sounds like Rock Band World Tour mode to me. Playing songs on higher tiers before you beat the lower tiers? That's a Rock Band feature, not found in any other Rock Bands. It almost seems to me that the makers of Guitar Hero sat around and played Rock Band to get their ideas and then just changed them slightly.

It wasn't all bad for Guitar Hero though, including "Crazy Train" and "La Bamba" it does have unique songs and brings back the image of guitar battling bosses during the game that Rock Band has never tried. Another thing that true Guitar Hero fans would appreciate over Rock Band is how much more challenging Guitar Hero is. Rock Band on hard is the equivalent of Guitar Hero on medium. This may not make a difference if you are not good at Guitar Hero, but the hard level should really be hard, and if you're an expert, it should show that in your game play.

Overall i would give Guitar Hero world tour 3 out of 5 stars. The original songs are good, and if you are a fan of the series you will undoubtedly like this one. But, since everyone does expect Guitar Hero to try and compete with Rock Band to me it did not come even close to meeting nor exceeding Rock Band. Just because you add the bass, drums, and michrophone does not make it Rock Band, though using the same songs does make it as close to Rock Band as they can get but thats not what a consumer wants. If Guitar Hero is to compete with Rock Band they need to make it better and be more innovative, it needs to be one step ahead of Rock Band, instead of trying to just meet Rock Band and falling a step behind.

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