A commendable attempt to get a full band party game going, but it just doesn't have the polish that Guitar Hero does.
The peripherals are just cheap and lazy. The guitar is too light, feels completely wrong, and keeps me worrying that I'm going to accidently break it. The microphone is just like the one from kareoke revolution, you can't really screw it up. The drums are pretty cheap, and it feels like you're going to break the bass pedal. They're also very loud, and the bass pedal can be pretty unresponsive. The drums also take some getting used to but once you have they're a lot of fun and a really different experience than the guitar.
The graphics are pretty average for a Wii game. I would have appreciated it if Harmonix put a little more effort into it. You don't really have to have nice graphics in a game like this, but it's still nice to have. The load times are kind of long for a game that does so little graphically.
The soundwork is pretty good. There's way too many covers though. What really disappoints me is that all of the songs on there that would normally be my favorites have really bad covers that ruin them. That being said there's a good mix of genres in the game and just about anyone should be able to find something they enjoy. There's a ton of downloadable content, but for some reason Harmonix didn't make it available on the Wii version, a rather large disappointment.
The gameplay is this game's saving grace. By themselves none of the instruments are as fun or challenging as playing the guitar in Guitar Hero, but when you play together with friends it's a blast. The menus are pretty poorly constructed in comparison to any of the Guitar Hero games I've played. The character customization has been left out of the Wii version for some unkown reason.
Overall the game just doesn't stack up to the polish of the Guitar Hero series. On top of this the Wii version is incomplete and pretty lacking when compared to the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 versions. It's a really fun party game, but nothing more than that.