Having just completed an extensive analysis of Rock Band 2's Expert vocal campaign, I was eager to test out Guitar Hero World Tour's vocal capabilities. It'll be easy to grasp for anyone who's played Rock Band or Karaoke Revolution: Lyrics scroll across the screen, and you try to match your voice up with a line reflecting the pitch of the melody. Lyrics are divided up into phrases, and if you sing well enough, you get a perfect rating and your score multiplier goes up.
The biggest difference between GHWT's vocals and other recent games is that there's no immediate feedback on how you're doing within a phrase, no little pie or meter to fill up. You can see if your vocals are matching up with the song's pitch, but it can sometimes be hard to tell where you're missing if you're only off by a little. There are some other tweaks with regard to Star Power and freestyle sections: if you have Star Power built up, you can activate at any time using the controller (instead of waiting for a special trigger sections), and you can also just mumble and scat during empty sections to rack up some extra points (we've not seen anything resembling Rock Band's percussions sections).
We also found that the game grades vocals pretty harshly. Even on songs where we only missed three or four phrases, we'd end up with scores in the 80% range, leaving us to believe the game grades on words or even pieces of words, regardless of whether you get a full rating for a phrase. On the plus side, there are plenty of stats in GHWT. After every song, there's a full stats breakdown for every instrument and phrase, something we've missed in Rock Band.
The last instrument we tested out, of course, was bass. For our first attempt, we picked one of the more challenging bass songs, Muse's "Assassin." On Expert, we were quickly introduced to GHWT's biggest bass tweak, open notes. Represented by a solid purple bar across the entire note chart (similar to the drum's bass pedal note), this is effectively a sixth note played by strumming without holding down any fret buttons. It turned out to be a lot harder to get the hang of that we'd initially thought. You're so used to closing your hand to hold down a fret button while strumming that it's a little awkward strumming while not pressing anything.
This really only scratched the surface of all the gameplay in Guitar Hero World Tour. There's the band interface, the setlist, the progression through all the different songs, and a lot more. Over the next week, we'll be presenting a great deal more info on these aspects of the game as well as further impressions of the new instruments, so check back regularly as we sink ever deeper into this entertaining world of plastic guitars.
