Those of you with iPhones may recognize Guitar Rock Tour from Gameloft, the prolific cell phone game developer. If you played it on the iPhone, you know what to expect. In fact, if you've played any of the rock rhythm games of the past few years you know what to expect. You're in a band; you want to make it big so you play a bunch of gigs until you inevitably become the headliner. The game throws a new wrinkle into things by allowing you to play both guitar and drums, which makes for some fun gameplay; however the substandard covers serve to harsh your groove.

The story here is nothing new, and certainly not the reason you'll be playing the game. It serves to give you a reason to travel from place to place and gig to gig, but not much more. Luckily, the gameplay while you're in a gig helps you to forget that this isn’t Shakespeare. When you start a career you choose whether or not you play guitar or drums and a difficulty level and you're off and rocking. The game doesn't allow you to switch up instruments within a career; however it will allow you to keep progress in all three difficulty levels at the same time. Once you have your instrument, you pick a character from the stable of rockers and you're off to your first gig, the prerequisite basement party.

The game eschews the crippling peripherals of the Guitar Hero DS series, instead using the DS's touchscreen, shoulder buttons and face buttons for playing. When playing guitar, the usual note chart appears, and you'll have to tap the note once it crosses the pickup at the bottom of the screen. For held notes, you, well, hold the note. For chords, you slide the stylus across the notes in the chord. At first, the chords seem wonky, but once you get the hang of it, they work surprisingly well. As you start up, you'll be able to handle songs with just your stylus, however as the songs progress, or you choose higher difficulty levels, moving to a two thumb mode is essential. Similar to every other rock game out there, you'll be thrown a bunch of power notes to build up your power container. Once full, you can either turn on a score multiplier or start pyro mode which burns up all of the notes on the chart, giving you the score for playing the notes as well as giving you a small break in the action.

Drums are less complicated, but no less fun or challenging. For drums you can either hit the snare and the bass drum on the touchscreen, or use the face or shoulder buttons. For example, hitting the right shoulder button strikes the bass drum, hitting the left shoulder button strikes the snare and hitting both shoulder buttons together hits the cymbal. For something that only requires three inputs, it's surprisingly fun, and on the hard difficulty level, challenging.

You'll have fifteen songs on your menu of rock ranging from newer hits like Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" and "The Great Escape" by Boys Like Girls to older classics such as "Smoke on the Water" and "Rock You Like a Hurricane". With only 15 songs, you'll repeat some songs a few times, which is a shame, but not because you don't want to play them but because the covers aren't so great. Some are serviceable and sound like the band that originally performed them, but others, like "Beat It" sound like they're being done by the band on Dancing With the Stars. When playing a game that has you performing rock music, you kind of want the music to be one of the strongest parts of the game, which unfortunately just isn't the case here.

The game's goofy vibe helps to offset the less than stellar audio. The characters include the staple of Riot Grrls, new wave drummers, rockabilly dudes, punk chicks and even a woman sporting a huge set of angel wings. During the performance, you'll be treated to the usual animations of all out rocking, complete with levitation and other tricks when you deploy your superstar power, but you'll be too focused on what you're playing to really see what's going on. Still, when you can sneak a peek of the top screen, you'll probably chuckle at the goofy charm of it all.

Once you've finished both instruments at all difficultly levels, you can team up with a friend who has a copy of the game for intense co-op rocking. You can either duke it out competitively in a score race, or rock cooperatively with one person on the axe and one on the skins. Song availability is tied to the host's profile, so to get the most out of your multiplayer experience, make sure you really are rocking out to the hostess with mostest.

It's a shame that the songs in Guitar Rock Tour aren't as strong as they should be, however even with this, the game provides a fun, albeit goofy, rhythm experience. The addition of drums helps to extend the replay value, as does the ability to play with another person over the DS's wireless connection. If you don't care about the quality of the covers, then you'll get more out of the game, but even the most serious of audiophiles will find some fun rocking their way to headliner status.

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