I got to play some for a little bit on both guitar, bass and vocals. Here are my quick thoughts.
1. This is an incredibly ugly game on all fronts. Graphics, animations, menus, highways....you name it, they found a way to make it the equivalent of caveman drawings etched with feces, both man- and animal-made.
2. Good lord, the vocals are dumb; between the lack of any real distinction of how well you're doing, the overly harsh grading (the original singers couldn't pass these songs on expert) and interface woes (the font they chose makes it hard to read some of the words, spazzy pitch indicator), it just makes me want to turn off the game immediately. Sure, it's harder than Rock Band, but I'll be damned if you can convince me that it's for the better. BY THE WAY; humming not only works on GH:WT but seems to be the only way you're going to maximize your points, which in turn turns you into just as big a loser as
Billtvshow.
3. I'm not a fan of how the career is set up and it has less to do with BWT (which, I freely admit, has its own issues) and more to do with the Tour Challenges in RB2. The one thing I fucking love about the Tour Challenges is the game focuses on what would be the best and most challenging tracks for that instrument. This does make it feel less "fleshed out" than going through all the songs normally would, but the focus puts you right into the songs that you really
should be playing. There's nothing inherently wrong with playing all the songs to progress, but you do have to go through a lot of ehhhhhhhhhhh stuff to play before you get onto the great stuff. Basically, the method GH:WT has works, but I'd rather play through the 30 great songs for any given instrument than play everything and know that I have to go through duds like No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn or Beat It on everything but vocals.
4. The new mechanics for guitar/bass (OPEN STRUM!!! SUSTAIN MECHANICS!!!!) are awesome, which makes a lot of the actual band stuff more disappointing since they almost feel tacked on in comparison.
I think I understand the IGN review a lot better now, as it seems like that the game does an impressive job of burying all the good stuff underneath 18 layers of shit. The good stuff is genuinely quite very good, though, which is what will (hopefully) keep my interest in the long run. It really makes me hope that we'll start seeing them work on the larger problems with GH Metallica and stepping their game up substantially for the next "real" Guitar Hero game. It's hardly a terrible game as it is, but it really, really tries to be at times.
lol) thread, I'm thinking about picking up GH3 for cheap. What DLC is worth getting? I'm thinking Virtuoso pack, Dragonforce pack and Death Magnetic. Anything else?