Guitar Hero World Tour

Career mode is also a relative letdown. It's split into decent single-player versions for each instrument and a multiplayer alternative for two players or more, but the multiplayer mode is rather flat next to Rock Band's slick, globetrotting gig sequences, which had a mix of individual songs and sets, some with mystery line-ups that incorporate songs from later in the game. Gigs in Guitar Hero World Tour are 3-6 song sequences, with only a few surprise encores to lighten things up. Small but important details are missed - Rock Band's load-screen silhouettes, the crowd singing along, "fans" as experience points - without satisfying replacement.

The occasional introduction of a famous rocker is also rather incidental. Sting, Ozzy Osbourne, Hendrix; throwing in celebrity musicians to play with and against used to be a way of injecting personality into a single-player rhythm game, but in a genre that now puts the emphasis on the band in the lounge instead, the presence of these caricatures is anachronistic, as are the cartoon visuals and wacky venues. However, there are leaderboards for each song post-play, you can set up your own set-lists quickly and intuitively, and there's online four-versus-four Battle of the Bands.

And away from Career, there's the Recording Studio. Thanks to a series of tutorials and a handy wizard, the Studio interface allows players to set backbeat, bass-line and tempo quickly and then start laying down songs by ear or musical experience. Guitars can be used to input lead, rhythm, bass and keytar, or act as drum machines, and the actual drums are also supported. The interface is tightly packed here, even compared to regular four-player play, and juggling controls for input, recording and playback can be fiddly until you learn your way around, but there are some nice touches - like raising or lowering the guitar neck to move between octaves.

Then there's GH Mix to nudge notes, create loops, re-record parts and generally mess with the sound, and for every shortcut available, there's a manual route to add subtleties that matter. Once a song is tagged with genre, the correct instrument parts and album art, it can also be uploaded to GH Tunes. Activision has said it will delete copyright-infringing material upon request, but we doubt this will stem the tide.

Overall Recording Studio is versatile, and even though creating music is less immediate and visual than other games that rely on user-generated content, like LittleBigPlanet, it's easy to envisage this becoming a cult attraction among Guitar Hero's many legions of fans, whose work will then benefit the musically illiterate. Any song produced in the Studio - whether created locally or downloaded - can be played as a song in the regular game, and the only missing part is vocals.

It should also be noted that the game, as a whole, does not just play to the most talented and devoted. Difficulty can now be adjusted when you fail a song, even if it's the middle song in a set-list. Faced with one of Guitar Hero's notorious difficulty spikes, of which there are a few here, the option to try again at a human level is very welcome. Neversoft has also allowed access to gigs at any stage of a Career mode on any difficulty level once they are unlocked, even if they were originally accessed through a lower skill setting.

All of this leaves Rock Band at a slight disadvantage, but it makes some of that back in its soundtrack. Guitar Hero World Tour has 86 songs on-disc, but still has fewer anthemic, sing-along selections. It's important that songs in a group-based rhythm-action game are recognisable, because the vocalist often sets the agenda, and while the instruments accept skill and reaction as compensation for foreknowledge, ignorant karaoke can be disastrous.

However, it's easy to imagine Guitar Hero World Tour players tearing through the set-list and then - thanks to the cross-compatibility of instruments - going back to the shop to pick up a Rock Band 2 solus disc in a few months, which also grants access to the Harmonix game's downloadable content archive. The small number of people who bought Rock Band in May or September can do the opposite and buy the Guitar Hero World Tour disc to take advantage of the Recording Studio and extra songs.