Since picking this up yesterday, I’ve made a start on all four careers (guitar, bass, drums and vocals). The new guitar peripheral feels really good, I’ve dived straight into the Expert career (after making it to the final Expert tier of Guitar Hero 3 by beating Cult of Personality the day before picking up World Tour); I haven’t used the slide panel on the neck very much, but it gives quite a fun wah-wah effect on held notes, as well as being used for specific segments. Bass is pretty straightforward too, once you get used to the new open notes.

Song selection’s been a real mixed bag; World Tour moves away from the very linear tiers into slightly more free-form venues with (to start with) two or three songs before an encore, with some great stuff mixed in with songs I haven’t come across before, nothing awful so far, I’m sure the newer songs will grow on me. Starting out on the Easy setting on the drums, I’m slowly getting to grips with the new gameplay, generally doing fairly well, though odd rhythms in unfamiliar songs are tricky, I think working up the difficulty levels will offer the most challenge. Finally, I’ve even tried vocals on Easy, though only when nobody else is around to inflict my singing attempts on. The first two songs, About A Girl and The One I Love went pretty well (mostly due to very wide tolerances, I presume), but then the encore of You’re Gonna Say Yeah! came along, and while I’ve done fine sight reading guitar and drum parts, vocals really don’t work so well; I did pass, somehow, but I think I’m going to work through the set list on the other instruments to at least get vaguely familiar with the new songs before tackling the vocals again.

There’s a few niggles, like a lot of the text being quite small and hard to read even on a 37″ screen, but overall it’s a worthy full-band follow-up to GH3. Just downloading a couple of the free songs to test how downloadable content works out, so if you’ll excuse me, I have some rocking to do…