Guitar Hero: On Tour

The quantity and quality of the music is also a concern. There are 26 songs in total (25 of which are listed in our comparison of the UK/US and multi-language European editions), which is an understandable shortfall given the size of a DS game-card relative to the capacity of a DVD-based console game, but the quality of the sound - whether through the DS's tinny onboard speaker or over headphones - is noticeably poor. The quality of the actual line-up as subjective as ever, but we could have done without the ageing "All Star" by Smashmouth (surely a pop song anyway?) and Blink-182's "All The Small Things" and with a bit more along the lines of "Pride And Joy" by Stevie Ray Vaughan, "Black Magic Woman" by Santana and "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" by Pat Benatar.

Structurally the game is serviceable. The Career mode unlocks songs in sets of four with an encore song at the end of each tier, and can be played at any of the four usual difficulty levels. The toughest of these - Expert - is largely unplayable with this control scheme, but having spent a few hours polishing off Medium we were able to get past enough of the game's quirks to succeed to the halfway point on Hard. The previous games' Practice mode returns to help you through difficult tracks, allowing you to take sections of the song as either guitarist or bass-guitarist and go through them without the pressure of the scoring mechanic. The only difference is that you can't change the speed of the song to nail it in slow motion first.

The most sizeable addition to the DS game is Guitar Duels, where you play a track as a tug-of-war between yourself and an AI or human player (over local Wi-Fi), using power-up attacks to try and disrupt your opponent. Power-ups are collected by completing highlighted sequences of notes, as you would with Star Power, and deployed by tapping specific icons on the screen. On the receiving end, you find yourself having to re-attach a guitar string with the stylus, blow out a fire with the microphone or scribble a signature on a fan's underpants, and also cope with passages of increased difficulty or having the screens flipped over to disorientate you.

There are other basic one-off duelling and co-op multiplayer modes too, although we couldn't test them because they require two copies of the game. Given the amount of people who bought it in the US, you can probably expect to find a few opponents when it ships here, although online play would have been nice.