Rock Band 2 review (360)

Europe didn’t have as long to wait this time. Less than half of the wait as the original Rock Band. So much so that most of us haven’t actually finished Band World Tour yet, but that’s kind of irrelevant. As the massive popularity of the generous weekly lashings of downloadable content that Harmonix, (developer of Rock Band and the original two Guitar Heroes if you’re counting) have shown us, we are all looking for new music. It’s actually only around a year of development time that has pumped out this new version, and apparently they’ve tried to listen to all of our feature requests and include them in Rock Band 2. I’ll believe that when they release an official cowbell peripheral.

It really pained me around the release date of Rock Band 2, as time drew on and it became more and more obvious that we weren’t going to receive any review code, despite Harmonix showing me a rather good time at a preview event a month beforehand. It pained me because according to our new review policy, we don’t review games that we are not sent, to be fair to those publishers that do bother, and I wanted to tell you all even more about the game and why you should buy it. Still, major releases that we really should cover are given time for a review when we are free to do so later in the year. Now we are over the holiday peak of new games, we figured it was about time to mention Gears of War 2 and Rock Band 2.

Track listing

Let’s face it, with all of these music games, especially now that we’ve got Guitar Hero World Tour to compare it to, the majority of the gameplay comes down to the track listing, and Rock Band 2’s has impressed me throughout. With over 100 songs if you include those free to download, resale value diminishing 20 bonus songs of relatively unknown artists, the setlist is almost guaranteed to bring a smile to your face at every level. While the now standard method of unlocking new songs is gone, the bulk of the game remains in the Band World Tour.

Basically it’s a choose your own path scenario, where you can play whichever of the pre selected songs you like to progress and unlock new individual tracks and set lists. Sometimes you’ll get the opportunity to choose your own list to get closer to unlocking the next milestone, and sometimes you’ll even get a random selection to keep you guessing. Now, thankfully, each mystery setlist is rated from simple to challenging giving you some kind of inkling into whether to attempt it on the harder difficulties or wuss out and try an easier alternative. Though for when your less talented or practised friends play, there’s a handy new ‘No Fail’ mode to make sure no-one gets too stressed out over the game.

Chords chords chords

Certainly the track listing seems much stronger than the original Rock Band, and indeed most of the other music games out there. Yes, it’s a massive track listing, but with tracks like Livin’ On A Prayer, Pinball Wizard and even superb Guitar Hero 2 anthem Carry on Wayward Son slotting in there, it’s always a welcome surprise to see what’s next. It’s certainly not a perfect set list of course, needing to be appealing to everyone being the priority, so there is a large variety of styles, some of which you’ll not be so interested in playing. Many of the songs are chosen for being good songs to play overall as a band, rather than necessarily being focussed on guitar, so there are a lot of chord based songs rather than riffs, but that’s very forgivable since the wizards at Harmonix manage to keep each song playing differently, throwing up new challenges at every turn.

The necessity of ramping up the difficulty however means that the game will again be challenging even to experienced players. I had no problems with any of the Rock Band songs on Expert guitar bar perhaps the end of Green Grass and High Tides, but Rock Band 2 includes plenty of metal which generally involve very fast complex button mashing. One song at the end of the set list, Visions, is gaining a reputation in the community for ‘breaking the game’; it is so difficult that most players will have to drop a difficulty level (or two) to just beat it, and when one of the set lists is an endless 84 song beast of all of the on disc songs it can be frustrating to have to drop down on the simpler songs too. The rest of the game is well designed to avoid this problem, allowing each player to choose their own difficulty and change them between set lists.

More ways to play

There’s a nice new Challenges mode that kind of replaces the standard Solo Tour of other music games where you’ll have each tier unlocked in sequence and be able to play the songs in any order. Now you’ll unlock new set lists of music to play in any order and you can even quit mid setlist and return to where you got to, changing difficulty or instrument if required. Then there’s the Battle of the Bands online feature that lets you and your band go online and post the best score you can using various restrictions. Some might require a vocalist, some might be bass guitar only and some may even not keep your score, but rather concentrate on the best note streak you can hold.

It just adds you to the leaderboards, but it is very satisfying to complete them and post your achievements globally. Unfortunately, since we’re a few months behind the US release, these challenges, of which new ones are posted daily and generally last a week, have become rather more complicated than they were at release. Rather than simply choosing the majority of songs from the RB2 disc, most of them now use clever wordplay to include DLC songs with related titles. I’ve got over 200 songs on my playlist through downloaded content and exported RB1 songs and I’ve only found a couple of challenges I’ve got the correct songs to play.

Wait, go back again…

Yes, exported Rock Band 1 songs. With the first implementation of original game content in a sequel, you can load up the original game, go into the options screen and choose to export your songs to your hard drive for a small fee of a few quid. Four songs are missing from the European RB1 disc, but that leaves a tonne of content that is completely integrated into the new game. Definitely a fantastic system, it also benefits the challenges which dynamically create new challenges depending on what content you own. If you have three or more songs from a specific artist, a challenge will be created from them. I bought a couple of Weezer songs and they added to the Rock Band 1 ‘Say It Aint So’ and formed a new challenge for me to unlock and enjoy.

It was a problem with the original; the integration of downloadable content into the main game, but has been tweaked to improve the game immeasurably, and truly compliments the promise from developer Harmonix that Rock Band is a platform. Pretty much everything that people have requested to be improved has been. Band World Tour is now enjoyable online (and can even be played alone if desired), you can even set stand ins for when no human player is taking a specific instrument, so your band will always have your designed singer or bassist if you stick to guitar and drums. The only issue I have found is that the drum fill portions when playing online become silent rather than have the original drum track like the original. It’s a known bug and the PS3 version has already been patched to fix it; surely only a matter of time before the 360 game enjoys a similar fix.

Yes, the new instruments are nice, but if you’re holding the originals, or even the Guitar Hero World Tour ones, it’s not worth upgrading unless you’ve got a bucketload of cash to throw at the £200 Ion Drum Kit. At least not until your current instruments break. If you’ve already got Rock Band’s instruments, the cost is negligible for the staggering amount of new content and fun you’ll get from Rock Band 2. It is totally recommendable. If you’re wondering whether to go with GHWT or RB2 it’s an easy choice for me to make and it comes down to what Harmonix do best. Rock Band 1 was innovation. Rock Band 2 is perfection. Buy it.