Review: Rock Band Blitz

“The world’s greatest Rock Band player”

“A magician with a plastic guitar”

“He’ll melt your faces with his awesome vocals”

Are all things that can’t be said about me and how good I am at Rock Band, but I at least feel like a Rock Star and that’s good enough for me.

Rock Band Blitz is the brand new Arcade title from Harmonix and the first thing you will notice is the lack of reliance on the plastic instruments to play through the songs. Also you won’t be focussing on just one layer of a song; instead you’ll be performing drums, bass, guitar, vocals and piano all at the same time. Everything is controlled via your normal Xbox pad and although the control scheme looks weird it actually works pretty well. To play different notes you’ll need to use your left stick hit the left side of the track and the A button for the right side, to switch lanes you’ll be using your bumpers.

The huge difference about Rock Band Blitz is that you don’t have to worry hitting all the notes, you can’t fail a song, and instead you need prioritise which notes to hit to obtain the best score possible. Hitting notes will build up that tracks multiplier and there are various checkpoints that allow you to bank the multiplier, you need to make sure that every track has gone up at least once by a checkpoint otherwise the you won’t be able to increase the level.

As you complete songs you will earn Blitz Cred and coins, as you earn more Cred you will unlock power ups to help you get that all important high score. Each song allows you three power ups per song and they will cost you coins to be able to use them. Some are more useful than others but that’s the beauty of the game, some people will prefer to use a completely different set of powers to you. Some power ups are activated by pressing X, like blast, which will blow away notes in front of you. Some are applied throughout a song, giving you a slightly higher score rate on guitar for example.

What music will you be blitzing I hear you ask? Well let me tell you, there are 25 tracks and there is something for everyone from the likes of Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger” to Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing”, Pink, Fun, Fall Out Boy, and Blink 182 are all present too so it’s fair to say there is something for everyone. Of course if you are able to use you downloaded songs bought from the online store within blitz so that will add hours to your gameplay time.

Of course no game is complete without trying to outdo your friends. On the right hand side of the screen there is an indicator to see how well you are doing against your closest friends and of course there are plenty of leaderboards to compare scores against too. Score Wars allows you to challenge your buddies to see who can get the highest score in a particular song within a set time limit. The only real downside is ‘Rock Band World’ a Facebook application which links to the game which allows you to set goals and get more coins, but you can only access this from your PC, it feels a bit shoehorned in and as a result I haven’t really used it very much.

Rock Band Blitz is a complete change of style from the Rock band games we are used to but it’s good fun, and I’m still pretty addicted to it, plus I’m one step closer to being that Rock Band Star…..

Ok maybe not.

Review: Rock Band Blitz Results