It came out Sunday. I grabbed the Guitar + game pack for $100.
I haven’t played much yet. It doesn’t yet work properly with The ion rocker drum set and I’ve been drumming a whole lot since I got that kit. Strangely they had their QA staff working overtime weeks ago to make sure the patch that let it work the Ion (among other things) would be ready for launch but they didn’t release it yet.
The guitar looks to be very good. Compared the Les Paul it’s bigger, heavier, and feels sturdier. The strum bar is far longer, the pull is a little lighter, and slightly quieter (I think). It makes an effort to integrate the Xbox controls into natural looking parts of the guitar so it seems like less of a toy. I haven’t had much of a chance to play with the touchpad slider yet but it’s interesting.
Pretty much all aspects of the interface are worse than Rock Band 2. In the song, it’s harder to get a quick glance at your multiplier, crowd meter, star power, etc. They also dedicate less area of the screen to the note chart and more to the band graphics, which I dislike since most of the time I’m trying to look ahead at the music, not the characters. I also find the note chart to look a little messier somehow.
The in game menu system doesn’t seem that great. There are weird aspects to the multiplayer. Like - if you want to play cooperatively with a friend in quickplay mode where one of you plays guitar and the other bass, that works fine. But if one of you want to play drums and the other guitar, then you have to select a full band, at which point it automatically tries to fill in your band with 2 random xbox live players. Maybe there’s a way around this, I haven’t played with it too much.
There is a 4 vs 4 full battle of the bands mode that RB2 lacks (I think) which could be really cool.
The graphics are different than Rock Band. It’s hard to describe. The Rock Band graphics sort of give the impression of watching film, whereas the GH graphics feel more like video - less cinematic, more edgy. GH seems to have some really awesome stage designs, more varied and creative than RB2’s. The character creator is also much more flexible, somewhat like Oblivion, allowing you to do stuff like set the spacing between the eyes or the fullness of the lips.
The song set seems okay - I was hoping for more prog rock and metal. It annoys me that Tool finally made its way to these games and they managed to pick the worst 3 songs they could. GH4 and RB2 seem to share about 10 songs. I’m not sure if it’s intentional or they both happened to find the songs in their selection process for some reason (I have a hard time believing that two seperate development teams decided that Dinosaur Jr’s “Feel the Pain” somehow belongs in their game) but it’d be nice to reduce the overlap to have more songs available to people who own both. There’s no music store within the game that I found (you have to use the xbox live marketplace).
Strangely, Metallica’s Death Magnetic is 1.3gb as DLC. They use a lossless compression and there are 4 or 5 seperate instrument tracks. The other DLC is more appropriately sized. It’s strange that Metallica is apparently so concerned with the sound quality for that album when the CD version is so atrociously mastered (the GH4 version is substantially superior in sound quality to the CD version).
The unique feature it has over RB is the music creator, allowing community created custom music. I tried one song and it was decent and well charted. At the end of the song it asks you to rate it, so after some time there will be a lot of community feedback and the best stuff will rise to the top. It’s a cool feature.
I hear the drums are of questionable reliability. If you’re a fan of the various band games, I’d recommend buying the RB2 special edition set and then the GH:WT guitar bundle. That way you’ll end up with 4 instruments and both games. (Of course if you really like these games, I recommend the Ion drum rocker kit instead, it’s awesome).
Edit: Actually, I’m not sure how smoothly using RB1/2 drums works with the GH4 game, so the game has 1 more instrument on the drum track. I’m guessing it just binds 2 instruments to one pad. There are expansion cymbals for RB2 coming out soon which may let you play the GHWT note tracks correctly.