Not even the most frustrating hands-on could stop me being excited for Stage

Words by Chris Scullion2nd Nov 2026 / 5:25 pm

Sometimes when you’re attending an appointment at a show like Gamescom or Summer Game Fest, the fates conspire against you.

This was the case when I played Stage Tour at Gamescom back in August. The reason I didn’t write about it at the time is because the appointment frankly didn’t go as planned.

The reason I write about it now, two months after the fact, is because despite everything that went wrong during that session, the game’s endearing qualities still shone through enough to keep me excited for its release in December.

For background – because music game fans tend to question the credentials – like many people, I was a big Guitar Hero and Rock Band fan, especially during that golden era between 2005 and 2010 when no fewer than 15 Guitar Hero games and seven Rock Band games were released.

From Guitar Hero Aerosmith, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, Band Hero and the DS games with that weird hand grip controller, to The Beatles Rock Band, Lego Rock Band and the glorious Rock Band Unplugged, I gleefully absorbed every single main release, spin-off and handheld game and loved them all (even the ‘bad’ ones). As for 2012’s Rock Band Blitz, it’s one of my favourite games of all time.

I even enjoyed both series’ brief comeback specials in 2015, with Rock Band 4 and the ill-fated Guitar Hero Live (which deserved more love, if only for its brilliant music video streaming mode rather than its awful photogenic hipster ‘live crowd’ mode).

All this is to say I was an absolute die-hard fan of all things plastic instrument (God rest DJ Hero), and was still playing both series (on Expert, naturally) on a regular basis until a gardening accident in 2019 put an end to that – hedge trimmers and the nerves in my ring finger don’t get along well, it turns out.

Still, enough time has now passed since then, and even though my trusty Guitar Hero 2 X-Plorer guitar still waits in the attic for the day I decide to brave my fake rock career again, the opportunity to try out Stage Tour – the latest attempt to revive the plastic instrument genre – was something I couldn’t turn down, pain be damned.

Things first went awry when I turned up for my appointment to find a tall German man wearing a cowboy hat asking a PR if he could play the game. I was asked if I minded sharing my one-to-one appointment with this chap too, to which my inherent British cowardly courtesy kicked in and I lied that it was perfectly fine.

“I want drums”, he said as he entered the room. “We are playing Dani California by Red Hot Chili Peppers.” Rather than ask him whether he also fancied telling me where I was going for dinner later, I picked up my guitar and went along with it, eager to just play the game.

At its core, it’s just like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. That may seem like the most obvious sentence committed to a screen, but after Guitar Hero Live some people may just want reassurance that the main gameplay here is a gimmick-free recreation of the genre they loved playing a decade and a half ago. That reassurance is this – yes, it is.

If I had to pin down which of the two it was closest to, it would be Guitar Hero. Putting aside the fact that the design of the notes is much closer – they look like the little shiny gems from Guitar Hero, rather than the rectangular capsules from Rock Band – the game also includes the ‘tap notes’ which first appeared in Guitar Hero: World Tour, which are played by simply hitting the frets without strumming at all.

Guitar Hero was always far more lenient than Rock Band when it came to the timing window for hitting notes correctly. I couldn’t quite pinpoint where Stage Tour lies, suggesting it appears to be going for the Goldilocks solution by sitting somewhere in the middle – not too lenient, not too strict.

Not that I initially had a chance to study it much. “It is lagging.” My new German friend decided 30 seconds into our Red Hot Chili Peppers song that it wasn’t sounding good (making it authentic, in my opinion) and so he hit Pause and quit out, asking the developer to fix the input lag.

To be fair, I did notice it a bit too, but it wasn’t game-breaking. While Guitar Hero started on PS2 where the glorious world of CRT televisions meant screen lag was a rarity, the advent of flatscreen HD televisions and the varying degrees of lag created by their image processing means rhythm games never truly feel perfect until you take the time to adjust latency in the options. I was giving it the benefit of the doubt because we didn’t have time to mess around with it during my appointment, and yet here we were, very much messing.

Once my Stetson-wearing drummer decided he was finally happy with the setup we actually got to play a couple of songs without interruption, as the developers explained to me how the game’s new modifier system works.

You can apply different modifiers to the game to make things more interesting, especially if you’ve played the same song so many times you know it inside-out and are looking for a new challenge. One modifier may shift all the notes to the left, another may change all notes to double notes (and all doubles to triples), another may randomly shuffle the notes.

This feeds into the new Tour Mode too, which sounds like the main new addition compared to previous Guitar Hero and Rock Band titles. It basically offers a roguelike take on the genre – as you play your way through increasingly larger venues, you’ll deal with random songs and modifiers to ensure that every time you play a new gig it’ll be different to last time.

“It basically offers a roguelike take on the genre – as you play your way through increasingly larger venues, you’ll deal with random songs and modifiers to ensure that every time you play a new gig it’ll be different to last time.”

While this was all very exciting to me, I had to eventually stop playing and confess to the developers that I had been playing in pain the whole time. Turns out going cold turkey for seven years after my gardening accident still wasn’t good enough, and even though I had a blast getting my hands on the guitar again, stretching my finger to hit the frets was still sore.

I was worried this was going to be one of those games I desperately wanted to play but would have to instead watch on from backstage with a melancholy look in my eyes, like Nigel at the end of Spinal Tap before David gestures at him to come on stage and join him.

“Well, you can just use a controller,” I was told. My eyes widened. It’s since been shown in more detail in a new trailer, as seen below, but the realisation that I can play the game with a standard controller – something that was possible in some of the early Guitar Hero games but was eventually dropped – was an enormous relief.

There are two controller modes, called Arcade 4-Lane and Arcade 5-Lane. The 4-Lane method uses Left and Up on the D-Pad for the first two notes and the Y and B buttons on an Xbox controller (or Triangle and Circle if you prefer) for the last two. The 5-Lane method adds a middle note, which can be played with either Right on the D-Pad or the X / Square button.

As someone who’s spent more time than I’d like to admit playing Fortnite Festival because it’s the most comfortable way for me to relive Guitar Hero and Rock Band these days, the knowledge that Stage Tour has controller support is fantastic to me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to try to play it with the guitar controller, because it’s still the most authentic way to do it, but given my injury it’s great to know I can switch to the controller when that starts getting painful.

And yes, the controls can be remapped, so hopefully that means players with far greater accessibility needs than me – some of whom may have been locked out of the later Guitar Hero and Rock Band games as a result of their requirement to use an instrument – will also be able to work something out, instead of not being able to play and ending up stuck with the microphone (no offence to anyone who actually chooses singing).

Since that appointment, I’ve been trying to form my thoughts on Stage Tour, considering all the extenuating circumstances I had to deal with – my hijacked appointment, the lag, the physical pain at playing the guitar with an injury (and the emotional pain of realising I’m not as good as I used to be as a result), being made to listen to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers.

The most important thing is that despite having been subjected to far from ideal conditions, as I look at the calendar at its December 10 release date and realise it’s around five and a half weeks away now, the overriding thought that dominates is a very simple one – I still can’t bloody wait to play more Stage Tour.

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