Stage Tour [Preview]: Still got the rhythm

Stage Tour feels like exactly what we’d want a real successor to the plastic instrument craze to be

The RedOctane story is an interesting, albeit slightly sad, one. The original producers of the Guitar Hero series, they were eventually absorbed into and then shut down by Activision. Years have gone by and several former staff of it and Guitar Hero’s Nintendo port specialists Vicarious Visions have reemerged with the company’s name, rebooting it and leaping right into the music rhythm genre once again with their next project, Stage Tour.

The game, a direct through line from Guitar Hero, features the familiar color pathway music note-hitting gameplay of its predecessors, albeit with enough little changes to avoid the wrath of giant corporations. One of those changes is the colorization of the note line that activates once we go into the charged mode. It’s now orange, and somewhat matches the color of the orange note itself, so it would throw us off when we were taking down a couple of tracks.

Though the game is near identical to its past brethren it does take a tiny bit to get back into the swing of things, but once we do it feels pretty natural to play this kind of game once again. The IGN Live demo has a few tracks available, and the stations let us play alone or against each other. “Dani California” is one of the selections available, and it’s a nice long song to get reacquainted with the game genre.

We still strum the guitar controller and tap the color-coded keys at the end of the neck, slipping back into our old habits of learning when to hold the key and strum and when to let it go or slide it. There’s always some preparation and scouting ahead needed for games like this to be aware of the upcoming next color keys, but even in Regular and Expert Modes it’s not too much thrown at us to switch back and forth across the colors.

Stage Tour looks like a faithful adaptation of the plastic instrument music rhythm games of the mid-2000s, and will likely be a welcome addition to many house parties when it releases later this year.

This preview was based on a session at IGN Live 2026.