Marred by all sorts of complaints about prices and late releases Rock Band EU hasn’t gotten off to an exactly smooth release but we’re here to ask, Is it really worth all your hard earned money?
The first thing you’ll see when you boot up the game is an excellent FMV set to the tune of Deep Purple’s ‘Highway Star’ and it really sets the tone for the rest of your experience. Excellent tunes, Decent graphics and most importantly, A full band. Rock Band has an easy to use and well designed menu system so you can be sure to be rocking in less than 30 seconds although playing as a band takes a little more organisation. Selecting the ‘Band Quickplay’ option allows you to pick your instrument and character in a simple lobby system and you pick and song you want to play. However, Band World Tour (Arguably the games showpiece) allows your band to go on tour and play set lists in major cities around the world.
Unfortunately, this can prove to be quite irritating as the game often chooses random set-lists, causing you to play the same few songs over and over until you unlock a new city and hence, new songs.
Graphics.
Rock Band is a visually impressive game, far superior to the current generation of Guitar Hero games anyway. I can’t help but notice that the characters seem to look very similar to those found in another EA game, The Sims 2. Maybe its just me, but there’s definitely some resemblance. Not to say thats a bad thing though, I like the look of the characters. The screen layout is presented well, even in the anarchy that is a full 4-man band, although don’t expect to understand what’s going on if you’re playing on an 18” 4:3 TV.
9/10
Sound.
Obviously Rock Band’s forte is the sound track and quality. Thankfully its brilliant, I couldn’t fault it at all. Some of the tracks featured on the main set-list are covers of the originals (Indicated by the “As made famous by:” prefix) but even these are pretty faultless. I downloaded a selection of tracks from the XBLM including covers and masters and again, the sound quality is excellent.
10/10
Gameplay.
Brilliant. Anyone who’s played Guitar Hero will be familiar with the interface and methods of input. Hold the note and strum, and for drums wait for your cue and hit. Simple? Far from it. Once you’ve conquered your selected difficulty level (Easy, Medium, Hard or Expert), you can climb to the next and do it all over again with added notes, increased chart speed etc and get a fresh experience. The guitar charts are very similar to that of Guitar Hero 1 and 2 (Before they went all crazy in 3..) but the timing windows feel a lot tighter. After playing versions of songs in both games I found that RB was a lot more strict on the timings of your strums, but that might just be a personal error. The drums charts for the game are very good. I’ve played several tracks on the expert difficulty in RB and from the same chart with great success I’ve translated the song to real drums. The lower difficulties introduce techniques such as drums rolls etc, that you can then take on as you push on through the difficulties. The vocals section of the game is a lot like the layout for Singstar, You sing and match your pitch to the bar indicated on the screen. It can be a bit difficult to learn the idea first time round but you’ll soon get used to it. My only quarrel is the jump in difficulties, Easy can be finished by randomly talking in the mic, Medium is too fussy on what you do, But Hard mode expects you to know every song and be damn near pitch perfect, Expert a step above that. Again, Im sure its just my incompetence, but worth a mention none-the-less.
10/10
Peripherals.
A unique check for this review, but an important one. The instruments I received were those included in the ‘Band in a Box’ set. Firstly the drum kit I got was an EL series kit which has received several revision in the US and Im deeply confused as to why we EU players get this apparently defective design.. Playing the hard mode career I found that the bass pedal felt very cheap and not like what you’d find on a real drum kit. But I suppose thats what 3rd party mods are for. I also found that I was dropping notes all too often but I fixed this by using my own heavier drum sticks. The guitar seems very well put together and plays well but I found that straight out of the box my orange fret button was ‘sticking’ so thats off for replacement. The strum feels very different to that of the Guitar Hero guitars but not necessarily worse, after a bit of practice you’ll soon be rocking out with very little trouble. The microphone is just a microphone really, but it should be noted that you HAVE to use a controller with the mic as it has no controls on it. All in all not a bad set but I was less than impressed with the faulty guitar..
8/10
Conclusion.
Finally, to answer the question “Is Rock Band really worth the money” Id have to answer yes. We found that it could be purchased in its entirety from PLAY.com at just £130. If you are prepared to put down the money then you’ll be rewarded with hours and hours worth of fun, constantly expandable with tracks off the Marketplace.
Overall 9/10
Rock Band Review – Copyright (C) under Creative Commons by Falseywoo
