Rock Band 2

Rock Band 2 : A rhythm game where you and up to 3 others manipulate plastic toy controllers to match the colours scrolling down the screen in unison all the while imagining you’re part of Journey.

Story : The storyline of the game I guess would be the “Band World Tour”. You create a band and its members, and work your way from playing small venues to stadium sellouts and fame and fortune. Well that’s what the game tells you at least, at the end of the day, it’s a glorified repackaging of the normal music game campaign of just play songs to unlock more songs.

I don’t hate Band World Tour, I just hate being forced to play it. Unlike the previous game, you can play World Tour by yourself or even with other players on Xbox Live if you felt inclined. Perhaps because of this, the people at Harmonix decided it was okay to drop the standard Solo Tour mode, which was pretty much the barebones music game campaign of just playing songs to unlock more songs…. Okay so just playing songs in the order you’re told to play them doesn’t sound exciting as creating a band and turning them into international superstars, but you’ll wish it was there when you’ve got a party coming up in a few days! The process at which you unlock songs in World Tour mode is slower here than it used to be as your progress will often be halted when the game throws a massive setlist your way and won’t let you progress without finishing it. If you intend to go through the World Tour and have all the content unlocked so your friends this weekend can have their pick of songs to reject in favour of Living On A Prayer over, then you’re going to have to go through any number of setlists and hope that the incredibly difficult song you downloaded out of curiosity and can’t actually beat doesn’t randomly show up. Oh, and Lord have mercy, you better learn to love Carry On Wayward Son by Kansas, because it’s going to come up a lot.

Here’s a list of everything that’s new for Rock Band 2, just so I can get it out of the way.

For people who suck or just want to get drunk and make an ass of themselves : “No fail” mode, where you can do whatever you want and still finish the song. Singers also get it easier this time around as the game seems to be more forgiving with what constitutes as a syllable, allowing players who don’t know the words to a song to just shout “Timmy!” over and over and still rack up points. A Freestyle drum mode where you can jam with the drums while a song on your 360 hard drive plays in the background, a throwback to those old drum arcade machines that had working digital drums where players could try to play along to a song that played in the background and without the game calling you a failure.

For hardcore score freaks or I guess the “Through the Fire And Flames” crowd: “Battle of the Bands” mode where Harmonix randomly creates challenges of songs and posts rankings of the people involved. Since these challenges can be released even late at night, it ensures that manic Rock Band fanatics will spend every waking moment of every day smashing and breaking their drums. Also a new guitar and drum controller, with improvements that appear to be marginal and insignificant but won’t stop hardcore rockers from spending another $180 on a new set. If you feel this review is incomplete for me not having tried these new controllers for myself, I accept monetary donations to rectify this issue.

Otherwise this is Rock Band 1 with new songs. However, the hook here is that this is Rock Band 1 with better songs. The vast majority of tracks from the first Rock Band felt like they were picked off of an alternative radio station playlist. Presumably this was an attempt to choose songs that enough people would recognize, forgetting that this is a VIDEO GAME and that most of these songs present dull and uninteresting colour combinations for the player to match with their toy guitar. On any given instrument, the game didn’t become fun or interesting until around the seventh song set. Rock Band 2 begs for the player’s forgiveness for the sin of making us play Learn to Fly with a setlist of some 80 songs of solid gold. Seriously, when you play a song, any song (well, except the new Guns ‘n Roses song), you will quickly see why it’s there. The game makes some rather inspiring song choices, offering a combination of challenging riffs for the Youtube crowd and party songs like the Beastie Boys So Whatcha Want to make your high-pitched relative sing to. It makes it all the more painful that you need to “Start a Band, Tour the world” in the World Tour mode to unlock it all. And I actually love Carry On Wayward Son.

So should you buy Rock Band 2? (Yes).

Okay, I guess to be more specific, you should buy Rock Band 2 if you liked Rock Band 1. It’s pretty much the same game with much better music. If you Google a track listing, you’ll find the reasons to play this game. It also helps that any song you downloaded for Rock Band 1 will work with this game, and there’s the included coupon for 20 downloadable songs that Harmonix will release sometime in the future. If I had to guess when these songs will be released, I’d say “around the time Guitar Hero 4 comes out.”

Pros : If you have a phobia of changing discs, want to trade in your copy of the first game for the $5 it’s probably worth at EB, or think that the size of your in-game playlist equates to the size of your penis, you can purchase an online license to rip the songs from that game onto your hard drive and play with Rock Band 2…

Cons : Except that this feature is freaking useless as it excludes, among others, Enter Sandman, which tended to be the first song everyone wants to play from the first game.

4 stars