- Title: Rock band
- Platform:Xbox 360
- Publisher: EA / MTV Games
- Developer: Harmonix
- ESRB Rating: “T” for Teen
- Genre: Music/Rhythm
- Pros: Guitar, singing, drums are all very fun; easier note charts than Guitar Hero; good list of songs; amazing multiplayer
- Cons: Strat guitar isn’t as good as the Les Paul
Features
So what is there to do with all of these songs? If you are by yourself, you can play through a career mode as either a singer, lead guitarist, or drummer. You can also sing and play guitar or sing and play drums at the same time if you want, but it is pretty tricky. The game also, of course, offers a practice mode so you can get better. With friends over, you can play a band career mode. You can also take Rock Band online to play with other people on Xbox Live if you don’t have friends over to fill out your roster. Or you can just challenge others to one-on-one matches for a high score. All in all, there is a lot to do here and all of it is pretty darn fun.
Guitar Hardware
Most gamers will likely be making the transition to Rock Band from Guitar Hero, so I’ll start with the guitar part first. The Fender Stratocaster is okay, but I’m personally not a fan. It features a mushy (non clicking) strum bar. Fret buttons that are flush with the neck. An extra set of small fret buttons close to the body of the guitar so you can play solos without strumming. And a switch so you can change the sound your guitar makes in the game. It all sounds good on paper, but in execution, not so much. The effects switch is in a position where it just sort of gets in the way of where you hands fall if you use the whammy bar. Secondly, the extra set of fret buttons is a cool idea, and playing in special solo sections without strumming is neat, but the buttons are very small and very close to the body of the guitar so it is kind of hard to use them. I don’t have big hands, but I struggled with it. Also, the overall feel of the guitar just isn’t as heavy and solid and nice as the Les Paul. I don’t particularly like the normal fret buttons either and I’m not a fan of the strum bar. One thing I will say is that the smooth action of the strum bar makes alt-strumming (going up and down rather than just tapping down all the time) quite a bit easier than on the GH controllers because of how smooth and natural it feels. On the other hand, the tactile response and “click” of the strum bar in GH made it very easy to count your notes in long repeating sections while on the RB guitar I tend to get lost in repeating sections because it is harder to keep a rhythm.Guitar Gameplay
Thankfully, you can use the Strat or your GH guitars, so the choice is entirely up to you. You obviously don’t have the effects switch or extra frets, but they don’t really make that much of a difference anyway.At its core, the gameplay is exactly like Guitar Hero. Notes you are supposed to play scroll down the screen and you press the button on the guitar and strum at the right time to play the note. Rock Band shakes things up a bit, though. First off, the note charts are far easier than in the Guitar Hero games. Expert on Rock Band is about the equivalent of Guitar Hero II’s hard. This was done, we can only guess, to make the game more accessible to new players and promote the whole rock band party game appeal of the game. That is fine, and I know my friends appreciate it. But if you are a hardcore GH fan that can beat the games on expert, Rock Band’s guitar parts just aren’t nearly as satisfying.
Something else that needs to be mentioned is that the window for hitting notes is much smaller than the GH games, and getting your timing down is vitally important. In this way, Rock Band is more difficult than GH. It has easier note layouts, but much more precise timing is required. It doesn’t quite even things out in terms of difficulty vs. GH, but it thankfully isn’t as mind numbingly easy as it would have been otherwise. It is still very fun, which is all that really matters.
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