Rock Band review (X360)

Last week, I was playing PixelJunk Monsters Encore. It cost £1.99 and entertained me in the time between 100%-ing Grand Theft Auto IV and Rock Band’s much delayed UK release. The £180 RRP package arrived on Friday of last week (unsurprisingly EA weren’t going to send us one) and for some strange reason I decided it was a good chance to get some friends around, buy plenty of beer and snacks and warn the neighbours that they may hear loud noises. They did.

Rock Band, for those missing the recent rhythm music game genre revolution (or that South Park episode) is brought to us by Harmonix, the original developer of the Guitar Hero franchise, and takes their plastic guitar strumming concept and multiplies it by four, bringing back a secondary guitar to play the bass line, adding a microphone for SingStar/Karaoke Revolution vocals and a nice ‘where am I going to store this’ big plastic drum kit to play the… keyboard on? No it’s probably the drums, isn’t it?

The amazing thing…

All four of us, (not all of which are particular gamers; one in particular really didn’t enjoy Guitar Hero) played for six hours solidly, with only short breaks between songs to grab another beverage or remember to take the pizza out of the oven. The drums were a big hit (groan), attracting our previously guitar phobic player, who actually took quite a shine to the easier bass tracks too, and we all had a go at screaming out the rockiest of tracks.

We played on the obviously headlining mode of the game, tucked away within the multiplayer menu; Band World Tour. Upon starting the mode you’ll be asked to create a band by creating and customising your characters in a decent array of physical variations, title your band, give it a motto and even design a logo for it, using a rather robust set of creation tools. We played as ‘Treading The Boards’, titled after a sitcom I am creating, and it surprised us when on various loading screens we saw line ups of our characters, logo, and title put into different situations. The pleasure of seeing our mock up album cover, or our tour bus with our name written along the side really shows off the effort that Harmonix has gone to in providing an absorbing experience.

More customisation

Through playing gigs you’ll earn money depending on your performance (within a decent enough set of single player careers too) and in Band World Tour mode you’ll even gain (or lose) fans by performing in front of crowds. The money can be used to buy anything from a large selection new clothing that can then be customised further by choosing the colours or even designing your own images to put on said clothing. Our lead singer happily struts around stage wearing a ‘Treading The Boards’ T-Shirt, and when the very well designed music video style performance video become stylishly coloured, your characters are wowing the crowds, with your logo on your drum kit and the crowd starts singing along with your songs it fills you with a strong feeling of creating music with your friends and performance that most of us will never experience for real.

If one of your friends decides to sit out, that’s fine; like in single player mode your band will be filled by randomly generated characters and your score targets will be reduced. Unlike previous games of the genre you’ll be able to see how close you are to ‘five starring’ a show by the star logos appearing in the top right of the screen and gradually being encircled as you near your target. Naturally if you play on easier difficulties you’ll have to score less, and the note chart will be simplified from expert’s ‘pretty much dead on accurate’ to easy’s ‘keep up with the beat and it’ll be fine’ style. Thankfully Rock Band allows for each band member setting their own difficulty as the rewarding feeling of nailing a complicated solo rises with the challenge.

Objective: Play some good music

Band World Tour doesn’t just let you play what you like when you like, but cleverly pads the difficulty by limiting your gigs at the start until you gain more fans, win a tour bus to travel to different cities and further additions to your entourage, like a PR guy, that allow you to play the bigger gigs for more money and fans. In each city you’ll have three locations to play, each with around five sets that you can choose. Some are specific individual tracks, while others are long series of set and random songs.

Mystery setlists could be any song (either those already unlocked from the disc or your Downloadable Content) or you can design your perfect track listing and play it in a ‘create your own setlist’ gig. If that wasn’t enough, occasionally you’ll have different decisions to make on certain performances. You may be asked to perform it as a charity event, which means you’ll earn way more fans but no money, or corporate events which do the opposite. It does still seem strange to me however to play a song earning 11,000 more fans and only be paid $20 for the pleasure.

The Soundtrack

As with any musical based games, the songs within have to be a great selection otherwise no matter how much fun the game is, the player will bore quickly. Fortunately the game disc is full of great songs you’ll already know you’ll love and some you’ll discover here. Rather than list out the 60+ odd songs available, available from any retailer selling the game, just know that Harmonix certainly knows and loves their rock. Particular favourites of mine are Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden, which feels pretty accurate on drums even on the lower difficulties, which you’ll definitely have to start with unless you’ve got previous drumming experience, Learn To Fly by Foo Fighters, which is great to sing and Reptilia by The Strokes has that fantastic chorus guitar riff, best on expert mode.

Of course it wouldn’t be wise to ignore the vast quantities of DLC already available to us now. The 100+ songs that have been (and will continue to be) released in an average of three songs a week since the American launch have some definite gems in them. I couldn’t resist Boston – More Than A Feeling, and the three song Oasis pack to begin with. I ended up with about 10 extra songs for our party that were all well received and helped tailor make our set list to our own musical tastes, and the constant additions mean that there’ll always be something new to play, although your wallet will take an even bigger beating than you expected. Just try to ignore the fact that our ‘European Exclusive’ songs were released to US gamers before we even had the game to play.

Better to be a hero or part of a band

The obligatory comparison to Guitar Hero is kind of irrelevant at this moment. While no comparable game exists to provide a full band experience (yet), it is impossible not to recommend Rock Band to fans of the genre. The difficulty curve is much fairer than Guitar Hero 3 for example, with a series of possible achievements rather than the crazy GH3 tasks, and with far more downloadable content than any comparable game, cheaper than Guitar Hero’s and with a drum, lead and bass guitar and vocal chart, even ignoring the well designed performance designs, lip synching, and even scripting the characters to all jump in the air at a particularly dramatic moment it’s currently unrivalled.

Obviously you’ve got the now standard array of internet options that basically allow band quickplay for your chosen songs, with no real objective in sight other than the pleasure of playing, some score challenges, a tug of war mode and a decent enough single player campaign for each of the three instruments (with thankfully stackable achievements) Rock Band has become the definitive musical rhythm game. Sure there’s no Online Band World Tour, but they’ve already patched in an in-game music store with previews of the songs so it seems that the game is designed to be updated for free, while your music library is grown through DLC.

Do we care that it was late to be released over here? Not especially, now we’re rocking out, but unfortunately the price point does matter. In my reviews of the various PSN and Xbox Live Arcade games I have had to take price into account. Would I have paid £20 for PixelJunk Monsters Encore? Not a chance, but at £1.99 it’s a bargain and instantly recommendable. If we’d had Rock Band over here for the same price as America, £85, it would have been a 10/10 for me; instantly recommendable to anyone with even a passing interest in the genre. For a RRP of £180, (£140 if you shop around), with the added DLC expense to get the most from the game, it’s a purchase for the die hard fans only. It may however still end up being my game of the year; 8/10 for a £180 game is still a pretty incredible recommendation.