Hands on with Guitar Hero: World Tour on mobile

Travelling is as much a part of being a rockstar as making music. For every album comes a lengthy tour that sees you jetting all over the place to perform for rabid fans. Mobility, as it would be, is a cornerstone of rock and that only makes Guitar Hero: World Tour Mobile all the more pertinent. Rocking out to the near-complete game, it's evident this newest instalment travels into inventive new territory thanks to a slew of genre-pushing features.

Two distinct campaigns set World Tour apart from previous instalments, allowing you take on either lead guitar or drums. Playing guitar gives you control of three frets, whereas a fourth note track is added when playing drums for the kick pedal. Each row of keys is tied to a note track, so the three rows of numerals correspond to the strings on your guitar. The bottom row, which includes the star and pound keys, is used for the kick drum when playing drums.

You won't have much time to hone your skills on either instrument by way of the Career because it only spans three venues. Each set includes four core tunes and an encore track that unlocks when you've finished the basic set. It's a generous number of songs on mobile, although the solo experience is really only an opening act for head-to-head multiplayer.

Guitar Hero: World Tour breaks new ground with a suite of online features the least of which isn't real-time multiplayer. Using any of the game's 15 tracks, you're free to link up over the network to compete against others. A comprehensive ranking system tracks your performance and rates you in comparison to the entire Guitar Hero community. Beat a higher ranked player and your rank will increase significantly. Lose to someone with a lower rank, though, and you'll see your own go down. There's a full web companion that manages leaderboards for every song and compiles a whole range of personal statistics beyond rank, too.

Complementing the multiplayer push is downloadable content. For a full year following the game's release, Hands-On promises to provide one single for download every month at no cost. That nearly doubles the soundtrack without having to spend more money. Even better, additional songs can be purchased to bulk up your track listing. No confirmation on whether all of these tunes will support multiplayer, but we're hopeful.

Online play and downloadable content gets our attention, but it's the quality of music that truly impresses in World Tour. Clearly, a lot of effort has been invested into improving the audio quality. Every track has been optimized specifically to each handset and the results can be heard. Hands-On is taking advantage of of the hardware available on high-end handsets for multi-track audio and stereo sound. Of course, that not being available on lower-end devices means taking a hit on quality, but it still sounds decent.

While Guitar Hero: World Tour doesn't introduce any fundamental changes to how the game is played, there are some serious innovations that promise to push the franchise forward in a big way. Online play will prove to be a strong point and the ability to download track highlights a growing trend toward supporting micro-transactions. As long as the gameplay holds up with all of these additions, you're looking at mobile gaming's next rockstar.