Guitar Hero 4 Review

Being able to make your own tracks takes World Tour to another level

For all you established Guitar Hero veterans, you've still got the progression of difficulty levels from easy to expert. The general consensus around our office was that World Tour is ever so slightly easier that Guitar Hero 3 - although the expert setting still frequently got the better of Seb, our resident rhythm-game guru. At this highest level you'll now have to deal with more complicated power chord arrangements, whereby you'll start a note with two fret buttons held down and will have to add a third halfway through. It sounds nasty, but if you're good enough to play at this stage, you probably have nothing to worry about.

The important thing is that it's still easy to improve your techniques through sheer persistence: practice makes perfect, and the full range of 86 songs offers a decent variety of challenge at each level. The main career mode now allows you to switch between instruments and difficulty settings at any point, and you're now given a choice of gigs each time you progress. The end result is that it's now all but impossible for you to get stuck on a particularly hard song - allowing you to fully focus on honing your skills and tweaking your rocker with new instruments and clothes. You can play the entire career mode by yourself or with friends - even electronic internet friends, if close proximity to other human beings isn't your bag. Once again, this is a feature that was sorely missing from Rock Band (although in Rock Band 2), so we're very happy to see it included here.

It seems a little odd that we've come this far without mentioning any specific songs. If you've been eagerly awaiting World Tour then the chances are that you've already seen the complete song list online. Taste is subjective, of course, but we may as well throw our penny into the hat and say that we think it's pretty damn good. The three songs that everyone will immediately go for are probably Living on a Prayer (Bon Jovi), Beat It (Michael Jackson) and Today (Smashing Pumpkins), but there are plenty of other crowd-pleasers: Everlong (Foo Fighters), Eye of the Tiger (Survivor), Some Might Say (Oasis)... We could go on all day about the full line-up, but let it be suffice to say that there are a lot of top quality tunes, cut from a variety of rock-flavoured cloths.

Between this initial spread and all the downloadable content that Neversoft is promising, you're pretty much guaranteed to find something you like. Even in the highly unlikely scenario that you don't, there's always the opportunity to go and make something of your own, thanks to the somewhat incredible inclusion of a Music Studio mode. You might be expecting this to be some kind of cheap add-on thrown in at the last minute, but the surprising reality is that you're offered a remarkably deep set of tools. You can jam along with four mates at once, or you can go it alone. You can play along to a set bassline or drum beat, or you can meticulously construct an epic melody from the ground up. You can use your guitar to play the lead, rhythm or bass - or you can use it to play synthesisers, in the form of a keytar. Once you've recorded a tune, you can port it over to an editing suit where you can play around with the levels, create loops, and prune your composition note by note. And then you can give it a name, and some cover art, and send the whole thing online to be played and critiqued by the masses.

Core gameplay is the same as ever, now with added drums and microphone.

In other words, you can be a musician. There's no support for vocals, sadly - apparently this is due to bandwidth restrictions - but apart from this, the Studio has everything you need to create your own songs. No, it's still not the same as actually learning to play an instrument, but by Jove, it's pretty damn impressive - particularly when you consider everything that's gone into the main game. It may be the case that a large percentage of people who buy World Tour will never get into the recording options, but those who do are sure to be extremely happy. In a matter of minutes, we recorded a "freeform electrojazz sense-ballad" (in other words, a load of old twaddle), messed around with the levels, and then played it before a crowd. And because we played it on the hardest setting, there were more notes to hit than when we actually recorded the damn thing. We were booed off stage by a violent crowd because we sucked at playing something we had written mere moments beforehand. How cool is that? And if we had that much fun just messing around, how great is this game going to be once it lands in the laps of people who actually have some form of creative talent?

So yes, Guitar Hero World Tour is pretty darn wonderful. Okay, so the main bulk of it is yet another rendition of a game we all know by now, but it's easily the best rendition of that game that we've seen so far. When you factor in the Music Studio and all the creative doors that it opens, it's clear that this is by far and away the best rhythm game available on the market today. That's good news for you lot, but for Harmonix? Well, we'd say it's got a mountain to climb.