Part of the allure of Guitar Hero World Tour is the instrument set. This is the first drum set to come with cymbals. Unfortunately, that draw has severe failings.

First, the good parts. It IS neat having two cymbals to hit on songs. It adds a lot of fun to the song. The pads are nice and springy. If this set worked properly, it would be a great purchase.

The problem, of course, is that it does NOT work properly. We got the game and set immediately when it came out, so we thought perhaps it was just an odd chance that we'd gotten a bad one. However, the reports began flooding into us from all corners. It seemed that a huge percentage of the drum sets shipped had serious problems with pads not registering hits.

We contacted the manufacturers and they told us that they knew about the serious issues, and that they'd send us a kit to tweak the settings. Within a week we'd received a MIDI-to-USB cable, and we downloaded software from their website. That allowed us to use our computer to tweak individual timing settings within the drums.

This fixed it somewhat - but there were still issues. When we told them that, their website said there had been so many failures that it could be over a month before we got a replacement set of drums sent back to us.

Since we'd bought this from Amazon, we then turned to Amazon and reported a defective item. We returned the entire set to Amazon, and they promptly sent us a new, replacement set. Of course we were taking a risk here - that we'd get yet another defective set. Luckily, the new one we got was much better.

It seems the main issue with the drums is about the sensors within the heads, exactly where they've been positioned. If they are mis-positioned, a "good hit" on the pad might still not trigger the sensor. Most of the issues reported seem to be with the yellow and red pads, and those were the ones we had problems with as well.

The guitars are mostly all right, the buttons press well. However, the star power activation is very flaky. The microphone works like a microphone, there isn't much to complain about there.

All in all, I would make sure you buy your drums - assuming you want to risk this purchase - from somewhere you can return them to QUICKLY if you have a problem.