Rock Band is Harmonix’ ambitious new title, building off their past experiences with Guitar Hero and Karaoke Revolution, to allow gamers to create their own virtual bands. Despite the high cost of entry due to the need for additional peripherals including a drum kit set, Rock Band fully delivers on its promise, absolutely perfecting the experience of being a guitarist, drummer, or vocalist and playing with others.
The guitar mode is the easiest to compare against Guitar Hero for obvious reasons. Fundamentally, save for different graphics and terms (Overdrive instead of Star Power), the game plays pretty much the same- hit the frets and strum as the notes pass by.
Rock Band throws two major additions into the mix, though. First, special sections of some songs will be guitar solos, shown on a blue background. The play doesn’t change here, though your cumulative “correct” percentage through the section is tracked, and when the solo is complete, you’re awarded additional points based on how well you nailed the solo.
The other features is that some songs end with special “all out” sections, allowing you to just wail on the guitar (easier using the high frets on the Rock Band controller but can be done on a regular guitar controller as well) to raise a bunch of points, but these are only awarded if you hit the last few notes that follow the song. Both of these make, for the guitarist, a few additionally “gotchas” to watch for as you play through the song. From a standpoint of difficulty, Rock Band’s guitar tracks follow the same approach as Guitar Hero (Medium difficulty, for example, uses only the first 4 frets and has only a few places where hammer-ons and pull-offs are necessary), but tends to be somewhat easier than either Guitar Hero II or III’s equivalent difficulty- I was able to cruise through Medium, 5-starring all but a couple the first time out, and the songs on Hard that I’ve tried seem to be closer to Guitar Hero II’s late Medium song list. Expert difficulty, of course, is still challenging.
The provided Fender Stratocaster guitar controller has some nice features compared to Les Paul of Guitar Hero III, such as an effect switch near the whammy bar, subtle bumps on the 1st, 3rd, and 5th frets to help with hand placement, and the aforementioned high fret keys that can be used for the jam sessions, but the feel of it is a little more difficult than the Les Paul - the strum key does feel stiffer, and the fret keys click which can be somewhat distracting- of course, it’s unfortunately wired in the 360 version, but one can always play on the Les Paul controller if they desire, which can also be used as a bass.
The vocals aren’t too different from Harmonix’ Karaoke Revolution; you need to match pitch and rhythm as the words come by scrolling or static on the screen. As many rock songs contain less tonal sections, there’s also points where you just have to speak the words without concerns about pitch. Scoring works similar to the guitar, though based on phases and not on hitting specific notes. At times, you may need to clap the mike to provide additional rhythm (say, on “Don’t Fear the Reaper”) which also helps your score. Just like the guitar, you’ll have glowing phrases that lead to building your overdrive, and to activate it, you simply need to shout (rather loudly, unfortunately) into the mike during special empty vocal sections once you have enough overdrive power. Lower difficulties don’t require perfection, but as you improve, you’ll need to be both pitch-perfect as well as singing closely as the game can recognize the general phonetics of what you are singing.
The drums are the most unique part about the game. The game comes with mini drum kit with four pressure-sensitive heads and a simulated bass pedal. While the presentation of what you need to hit is similar to that of the guitar, there are only 4 notes corresponding to the heads, with the bass indicated as a brightly glowing line across the field. While at first it may seem a bit like the guitar, you’ll quickly realize that you almost have to separate out the bass drum part from the rest of the medley and yet recombine them as to be able to keep the rhythm successfully. Basically, Rock Band gives you a great appreciation for the oft-overlooked drummer for how well they can rub their stomachs and pat their heads at the same time. The drummer earns Overdrive in the same fashion as the guitar parts, and activates it by performing an appropriate drum rift, usually at the end of certain phrases, and just like at the end of songs, can participate in all-out sessions to try to score big points at the end.
Rock Band gives you several ways to enjoy the game depending on what you actually want to do. There’s the solo career mode available for lead guitar, drums, and vocals (no bass) through 45 songs plus 13 bonus songs (the song order depending on which instrument you’re playing), where you earn money for customizing your character (clothing, accessories, haircut, tattoos, and so forth), as well as solo quick-play mode for any song you’ve unlocked or downloaded. You can also create your own band off-line or on-line with up to 3 others (each playing a different instrument, with the computer filling in those you don’t have selected) and participate in a World Tour mode, similar to the solo career mode, as well as quick-play in the same fashion. In these multiplayer modes, the whole band is playing towards a common score, and should a player fail out, any of the other members can trigger their Overdrive to bring them back in. You can also play solo online modes of Tug-of-War, where you and a similar instrument trade off sections of the song to get the best score, while a Score Duel is a straight-forward one-on-one for the best overall score in the game. The only major problem in the various career modes is how the band order is “fixed” - if you’re a solo player, you have to create a new identity for each of the three instruments, while if you are in a band, you have to stick with the instruments as set at the start - you can’t swap from guitar to drums without forming a new band and thus restarting career mode from the start.
The song list is pretty good- again, while this can be highly subjective, the selection of songs is pretty centered on more mainstream rock tracks, and the bulk from the last couple of decades, but does a good job of representing the history of rock. The songs are selected as to provide a good cross of difficulty for the instruments, but as such, don’t necessarily have any memorial or difficult guitar or drum parts. The game already contains additional downloadable content at a somewhat more reasonable price that what Guitar Hero II had set, and Harmonix has promised more in the future including full albums, so chances are that eventually there’ll be songs and artists that you really like included in the game. As with Guitar Hero III, the fact that the majority of the songs are master tracks helps really make the audio quality of the game stand out, and even the few tracks that are covers still sound comparable, outside of vocals (such as in Rush’s “Tom Sawyer”).
The game appears somewhat similar to the past Guitar Hero games in graphics in the actual gameplay areas (though using bars instead of circles for notes). Nice touches include having the multiplier and Overdrive meter right at the bottom of the screen to make it easy to see where you are, as well as indicating how many stars you’ve earned based on your score and the progress towards the next star. Outside of the actual game elements, the background visuals are much more impressive than what Guitar Hero’s had to date. While the animation frame rate can be a bit jerky at times (with no affect on the main gameplay elements), it shows you and your band members having a lot more fun with the songs and being a lot more animated on stage, several different camera angles and post-effects, and more synchronization with the music in lighting and special effects on stage. There’s a few points where the band animation can distract a bit from the gameplay, but this is rather infrequent.
Rock Band is an outstanding success - the integration of the various gameplay types for each of the peripherals is well done, and the overall presentation is a step up from Guitar Hero. Online mode with both single and band play is a great feature that still allows you to experience being part of a complete band even if you can’t get three others to join you at your house. While the initial set list may not be as impressive as the Guitar Hero games, the promise and availability of additional tracks will help to only improve the soundtrack over time. Unless you can’t stand having a small-scale drum set cluttering up your gaming room, Rock Band is a definitely must-have for music game lovers anywhere.
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