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

Online Play

We had some complaints about Rock Band 2's online play, and Guitar Hero World Tour fixes some of those issues, but creates others. Here's the long and short of it.

In GHWT, you can't coop on your career path. Getting help unlocking songs from random strangers is a nice perk in RB2. Part of the problem in RB2, though, is that you either have to start a band and chose what everyone does all the time, or you have to join a band and be at the mercy of someone else's song picks. GHWT fixes that.

When playing with other people, every song a random band member is picked to chose the next song to play. This allows everyone to take turns choosing songs to play and is much better from a "just wanna play with people online" sort of model. And honestly, this is what we really wanted to do most of the time with Rock Band and had a hard time with. Joining other people's bands just lead to doing stupid challenges or other nonsense, and when we had other people join us they just dropped out and made us fail losing fans all over the place. With GHWT, there is no similar penalty for being screwed and left during a game, and if someone doesn't like the song you picked, they have incentive to stick around in that they might get to pick the next one.

With the headset jack built into the controllers, using voice chat over live is much more accessible. But we still didn't hear a lot of people using it. It is a little less necessary with this setup than with Rock Band though.

On the down side, you have to pick your difficulty setting from the settings menu before the song is picked, so if you go with expert you'd better be ready no matter what song your online friend chooses. Also you only have 10 seconds to decide to edit your settings between songs. So don't be slow either.

It is also not possible, when in the process of matchmaking, to decide you want to wait for a full band. The matchmaking process goes on and gives you one of two options: wait for it to finish working its magic or cancel. You might end up with two people, or one ... or maybe even three (though we were never matched up with 3 people). It's certainly less ambiguous as to whether you should wait for more people or not: you get what you get. But it would still be nice if you could set an option somewhere to definitely wait until you could be matched with at least 2 others if you wanted.

It's not a bad set up, the head to head play is better than in Rock Band, and the cooperative online play is fun as well. Both Harmonix and Neversoft have some things to work on for their next installment. Neither RB2 nor GHWT is perfect in the online department, but both have their strengths and weaknesses. Honestly, the best and most consistent way to have fun online is to play with friends you already know and skip the matchmaking. That's a good time on either game.