Not knowing most of the songs makes it incredibly difficult to play. On bass and drums, you can struggle through a tune because of those instrument's driving lines. Guitar can be pretty challenging on songs you're unfamiliar with because you often play melodic lines. As for vocals, just forget it. Even with the option for static lyrics toggled on, attempting to get through most of the tunes is disastrous. This only adds to the criticism that the series has grown progressively more difficult with each new installment. There's a minor step from easy to medium; however, get halfway through a career on medium and suddenly things get very hard.

This is a difficult game, but at least there are options to tone it down even if that makes it too easy of an experience. During band sessions, you and your friends are welcome to mark the desired difficulty for each instrument before heading into a song. That, sadly, isn't enough to address the difficulty issue. Should any member of your band fail during the course of the tune, you all fail. There's no continuing or trying to revive that lost track or anything. It's a seed of frustration because if you have a friend who struggles to sing even on easy, they're going to have a very tense time. And you thought Pink Floyd hated each other?

Complementing the main set of modes are two amazingly innovative features: a comprehensive song creation suite and song store. Dubbed GH Tunes, you can venture online to grab user-created tracks for play on guitar, bass, and/or drums. Vocal tracks have been left out due to bandwidth and space constraints, but getting a tune that supports three tracks from another player is pretty cool. Already there are an enormous number of songs available at no cost.

GH Tunes gives the game a huge advantage over other music games, even if the fundamentals aren't nearly as strong. A good tuning is needed for the microphone and drum set, firstly. Next, some adjustments are necessary to ensure that there isn't so much of a leap in difficulty among some of the tracks. With these changes, however, World Tour still remains stylistically inferior to Rock Band 2 and in the end the series is still playing catch up to the Harmonix juggernaut.

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