WestCreek Revenge Solid Body Electric Guitar, Heavy Metal Guitar, Right Handed, Alnico Humbucker Pickups, Rounded End Jumbo Frets, Bone nut, Rosewood Fretboard, Mahogany Body

I’ve played guitars for years and own several guitars from cheap copies to top of the line Fender and EVH brands. Amazing quality, sound, aesthetics, and ergonomics for a guitar this inexpensive. Great job Amazon, making a good quality guitar available to those that can’t afford a Gibson or Epiphone Explorer. It came ready to play except for a minor bridge height adjustment to eliminate minor string buzz. I did some minor adjustment to fine tune the intonation. The E string did break but I ordered one off Amazon for a dollar and got it next day. The neck plays well and sounds good on clean and distortion channels, good “hot” pickups. I’ll probably eventually adjust the truss rod a little. Anyone that doesn’t know these adjustments can Google them. There are many good How to Videos and you will learn more about the instrument and how to set it up to your preference. Pretty tough to have a Guitar Tech set up every guitar for this price range and guitars do need adjusting as they age. Better to learn now with a $200 dollar guitar so you know your stuff when you become a rock star and can afford a $10,000 Gibson Explorer. Good luck to everyone that gets one. Rock on.

Out of the box it looked flawless, tuned it up and it's damn near perfectly intonated. Has pretty decent sound as is but I do plan on having EMG HZH4 pickups installed. Not a lot of room in the cavity so I'm going the passive route. Looks like it came with D'addario strings since the ball ends are color coded. I'm impressed over all for a guitar in the $220 range. Very solid body, great weight to it. Love that it's not a bolt on neck. Fretboard and Frets feel great too.Really reminds me of the camo hetfield snakebyte so I call this my Fakebyte lol 😆

Out of the box, all I had to do was change strings, tune up and the guitar played great, it really did. The strings it comes with were terrible and dirty. Once I took them off, I wiped down the fretboard, cleaned the neck a little bit etc. Put the new set of strings on and was good to go.I was expecting to have to do a little home-guitar-set up or if it was really rough, a pro set up. But I did not have some of the experiences others buying this guitar have had. YMMV. Maybe I got lucky, maybe the company is doing a better job recently. I did not have to adjust the bridge/action. I did not have to adjust pickups. There were no intonation problems. Volume and tone pots were clean and worked well. Frets are great. No issues with the nut. I even went up a gauge in strings (9-46) and the channels in the nut were still just fine.I really put this guitar through its paces the first weekend I had it with a long jam session. In my rig, at volume and compared to my other primary guitars; this guitar is going to need a new pickup (s) So that's what I did. I already ordered a new bridge pickup for 100 bucks. Even after installation, I am only going to be into this guitar for about $300 bucks. CAN"T BEAT IT IMO. I could have bought a p/u set for 200 but since that would double the cost of the guitar and I hardly ever use the neck p/u anyways, I went bridge only.I had my eye on this guitar because it looks sick! and the Price was an eye opener and an eye-brow raiser at the same time. I read all of the reviews here; did some further research and kept watching it. Finally pulled the trigger on Amazon Prime day when there was a coupon available. That made the price under 200.I would say this is a great beginner guitar; or a great secondary guitar if you are an intermediate player. Especially vs paying several hundred dollars to over 1000 dollars for even an Epiphone Explorer. And you can't find Ibanez Destroyers hardly at all.

As an owner of several other "cheap" guitars (e.g., Xaviere, Glarry, Firefly) I took a chance on the WestCreek Revenge (red), fully expecting it to require a complete set-up and to have some minor fit & finish issues, maybe even require some downstream mods/upgrades to get it to punch above its weight.So I was very pleasantly surprised when the Revenge arrived this afternoon in (nearly) flawless condition, was playable right out of the box, and sounded absolutely fantastic.Appearance - positives:+ The red is deeper and more nuanced than the Amazon photos; in some lighting it is very vibrant and in other lighting it is almost maroon. Really comes alive, especially with the flame top.+ The sides, back, and neck are not black as they appear on screen, but more of a deep burgundy. A nice surprise!+ The stain, lacquer and binding are flawless all-around. The flame top is subtle but adds plenty of color depth.+ The glued neck joint is perfectly blended with the body as if the entire thing were carved out of one solid block of wood.+ The stainless frets are already polished with smooth, rounded ends - just as described. Extremely comfortable without any filing needed.+ The mother-of-pearl fret marker inlays are vibrant with plenty of 3-dimensional depth.+ The fretboard itself appears to be high quality wood; the coloration is consistent and there is no wood filler.+ The headstock logo appears to be mother-of-pearl inlay. Higher-end than what I expected; based on the Amazon photos I thought it would be a white decal. So another nice surprise.Appearance - negatives:- The highest fret marker inlay is *ever* so slightly crooked. You can only see it because the strings make vertical reference lines; most would probably not even notice. I’m picky about such things but even I can live with it.- The humbucker pickups in the Amazon photos have chrome covers. The one I received came with uncovered black pickups. Which I’m actually happy about because I would’ve preferred that look anyway. But it's in the negative list because it's still an assembly discrepancy; if someone is ordering this guitar hoping for the chrome pickups that are pictured, they would likely be disappointed.- All 3 of the control knobs are marked "volume" when in fact there should be 2 volume (top and middle) and 1 marked "tone" (bottom). The knob functions properly as a tone knob so the pots are correct; it's just the wrong tophat. I submitted a customer service request this afternoon to the seller to either send me a replacement tophat OR send me a partial refund that would cover buying new tophats myself. Again, it works right, so not a big deal.Functional - positives:+ As mentioned above, the guitar required minimal setup. I watched a YouTube review (apparently from a prior run of Revenge models in late '22) which said the nut needed cut way down, the truss rod needed big adjustments, the bridge was too high, and the intonation was way off. Well in my case, at least, none of that turned out to be a problem. The nut is cut perfectly; strings are low with no buzz. Neck relief is right where I like it (flat with no relief), and bridge height was also perfect. Just needs *slight* intonation adjustments on 2 strings. Honestly, I've never bought or worked on a guitar that was this close to being dialed in right out of the box.+ Pots seem to ramp up as they should. Saw a prior Amazon reviewer who had bad luck with a volume knob jumping straight up to full volume but this wasn’t an issue for me.+ The factory tuners are tight and don't seem to have a lot of slop in the mechanism. We'll see how well they hold tune but so far, so good.+ This guitar sounds amazing! The sound of these (black, uncovered) pickups matches the appearance of this guitar, i.e., full-bodied & aggressive. Crisp & vintage clean tones, monster crunch at high gain, with sustain for *days.*EDIT: Another + The pickup specs aren't listed, however, according to my multimeter they measure just shy of 10k at the neck and slightly below 14k at the bridge. So they're fairly hot and provide plenty of crunch, as you might want/expect with this style of guitar.Functional - negatives:- The strings suck. But factory strings always do, so I'm not sure this really counts as a minus. Just replace them with your favorite strings at your earliest opportunity.- The fretboard looks pretty dried out, so it's in bad need of oil at the first string change. But that's pretty much standard operating procedure unless you have a maple fretboard.- The high-E tuner knob is really hard to turn. So much that I was worried about breaking it when I initially tuned up the guitar. It seemed to loosen up a tiny bit after that, but still pretty stiff. Not a big deal, but might be a reason to upgrade the tuners at a later date.Overall, I am extremely pleased with this guitar. Especially at a sub-$250 price point! I realize that other user experiences seem to be mixed, so quality control may still be luck of the draw. But I'm pleasantly surprised and impressed with the one I received. Even if it had come needing a setup it would be a steal. This guitar looks and sounds as good - and perhaps better - than other "Explorer" and "Snakebite" type guitars costing >10x as much that I've played around with. If you're in the market for this style of guitar - and maybe tired of waiting for other more popular "cheap" guitar brands to release their next batch (as I did) - the Revenge is an excellent value.EDIT: I contacted WestCreek via Amazon customer service link about the volume/tone knob and they issued me a $10 credit within 12 hrs. Enough to cover the cost of a set of 4 identical replacement tophats, which I can easily change out myself.Bumping my review from 4 stars to 5, as this was really the only “negative” above that bothered me.