Review – Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades

Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades decides to break up the sets into venues that specialize in specific decades of music.  You start out in the Modern club playing songs that came out in 2007 (and one from 2005) and then move on to the New Year’s Eve themed club called “2000s” playing songs from 2000-2005.  It’s a clever idea and the venue owners who talk to you are actually pretty funny.  Other than the pure delight I got from seeing the 1980’s classic Atari style Activision logo when I started up the game, this is where the fun stopped for me.

Since it has been covered ad nauseum, I will skip any discussion of the horrifyingly bad controller grip for this game and jump right into what is wrong with the software itself.

Playing the guitar with a pick is a nice idea and a special pick stylus is included with the grip controller.  Unfortunately, if you really start to get into the music and rock out even slightly, you will surely start strumming in an area of the touch screen that will cause your notes to fail.

The music selection isn’t bad, but roughly 1/4 of the songs are on Guitar Hero World Tour.  The songs are all digitized to a point where they sound worse than ringtones.  The game encourages you to use headphones for the ultimate experience, but I found the DS speakers help to lessen the fake sound of the music.

Don’t buy this game.  Don’t rent it.  Just skip it.  It’s fairly difficult to enjoy for a number of reasons.  It would be nice to see Activision/Red Octane/Vicarious Visions/etc inject some of the humor from the cutscenes in this version of Guitar Hero to the full console versions, though.  For that single redeeming value, I give it one star.