Guitar Hero World Tour

While technically proficient in some areas, World Tour overall fills me with a sort of ire, as every sort of aesthetic decision stinks of blind obstinence in an attempt to stick it to Rock Band. RB only has six face types? Let's have all the sliders, never mind the end result for everyone looks the same anyway! RB has no set animations? Let's have a completely canned venue experience, never mind that the drummer will now never correlate to what's actually happening in the song! The game feels ugly overall despite what should be decent art direction, but that's still only half the story.

Guitar works fine outside of slider notes and extended sustains which are hit-and-miss, and the open notes on bass were a fine attempt to mix things up, which would later be refined to a worthwhile level. But while the option to activate star power with a controller was inspired, the vocals engine and charting made no sense, with too much weight on individual syllables rather than phrases. Compared to RB's unison bonuses and weighting, they clearly had no idea how to properly align every instrument for the band experience, making the vocals experience feel way more experimental with freeform talkies that just don't work. This is, of course, to say nothing of the drums, whose activations disrupted the natural flow of the chart and whose five-pad set-up successfully adds one more pad than RB's drum kit!...while taking away a lot of its plausible malleability, making the overall playing experience way more restrictive and repetitive.

One, of course, must mention the setlist, where for every five star mega-smash like Hotel California or Beat It is some weird European indie rock track or modern alternative song which is actually quite boring to play. I simply cannot fathom the thought process behind a lot of selections. Throw in the mess of GarageBand wankery that is GHTunes, and you have a game that feels so desperately it has to beat Rock Band at every corner that it trips over itself every step of the way.