Guitar Hero World Tour: The Best, The Worst, and Everything in Between

The Instruments: The Drums

This was where GHWT had the most potential to succeed. The low hanging fruit. Adding an extra trigger and raised cymbals was a terrific step beyond the Rock Band 2 template. It is well documented that Rock Band and Rock Band 2 feature incredibly subpar kick pedals and building a better kick would go a long long way to making a better experience. Unfortunately, Neversoft failed to capitalize where Harmonix fell short.

First the good. The GHWT kit has awesome pads. The three "toms" are much bouncier than the Rock Band or RB2 kits, and their sound is deeper and even less of a problem than the quieted down RB2 offering. The angle of the pads is a little less steep, which provides a better experience as well. We love the pads. But that's where it ends.

The cymbals aren't very responsive and are essentially dead feeling. This is similar to the ION Drum Rocker's problem, but slightly worse. Not a huge deal, but still. The placement of the cymbals is, on the surface, fine. I tend to have a splash and a crash at about the same general vicinity. But I much prefer my ride and hi-hat on the outside of the kit (far left for hi-hat far right for ride) which is not what we end up with here. The layout of the kit makes playing the blue tom sort of awkward.

And when playing the game, a roll across the toms doesn't look as natural as in Rock Band 2 because of the way the pads are laid out. This isn't a huge deal, and it just takes some getting used to. It is a little worse when using an RB kit, as the yellow pad is never (in our experience) used as a tom. Meaning rolls across the toms will skip from red to blue to green.

Additionally, as the orange (or blue on an RB kit) cymbal is not far right, there are some times where you've got to make awkward shifts of both hands. I swear there are some songs that just make me feel like I have to play like Stewart Copeland in the video for "Can't Stand Loosing You" for no reason. Actually, that sort of makes sense as he was one of the musicians that helped out with input on the kit before it was released. Seriously though, if you're playing some 16th notes on the orange cymbal (blue on the RB kit) with your right hand and have to hit the green tom without skipping a beat on the cymbal you've got to move both hands REAL fast twice (to get your left hand back to the snare and right hand back to the cymbal). Not a huge problem, but that's just not how I'd play it if the cymbal were really out of the way of the toms and I could just hit the green tom with my left hand.

ORLY?! ION/MIDI 4TW.

So yes, we have raised cymbals, but some of the functionality of that is degraded by how close to the toms the cymbals are, and the layout can be a bit confusing. It's worse on the RB kit with GHWT because they seem to have taken the easy way out and just combined the orange and blue lanes into one so that the yellow trigger is always a cymbal and the green tom is never a cymbal. No, they didn't have to, but it would have been really nice if they had adaptively combined the orange lane with either blue or green depending on context (ride or crash as per the RB conventions). Beyond that, it would have been perfect if they could have sometimes shifted the red/blue/green rolls to be either yellow/blue/green or red/yellow/blue rolls.

So... What next. Right, star power. That sucks.

Here's the problem. You've got to play the song, ideally without missing notes. In order to activate star power you need to hit the yellow and orange cymbals at the same time (or yellow and blue on Rock Band). But this is really tough in some songs, especially songs like Dammit and Everlong. Waiting for a break to throw it in is fine in some songs, but in others it's just stupidly hard. We understand the limitations of the RB/RB2 random fills method, but there should really be some other (better) way to activate star power with the drums.

One thing that does work is accent notes. These notes are visually different and you get a bigger score if you hit them harder. It's kind of cool, and it seems to get used often for open hi-hat hits in the songs we saw it used in. It works. It's neat. Unfortunately it doesn't work with the RB2 or ION kits even though they are also pressure sensitive (it just turns this feature off with the 4 lane version).