The Best Music Rhymth Game Yet
Harmonix, Creators of Guitar Hero 1, 2, & Rock the 80s', have abandoned the GH series and have teamed up with MTV games and EA to expanding the music genre by adding drums and vocals to the mix.
Now, the game is far superior in almost every single possible to any other console rhythm game to date.
The game has on hell of a soundtrack. Of course, based on your taste in music, you're reaction to the game will differ, but with classic rock bands like the Rolling Stones, KISS, Aerosmith, and The Who, and Metal Gods like Metallica, Iron Maiden, and Black Sabbath, and newer bands like the Foo Fighters, Weezer, and the Yea Yea Yeahs you really can't hate the whole setlist, but you may find a few songs here and there that you don't appreciate.
Here's the full Rock Band setlist:
1960's
* Rolling Stones - Gimme Shelter
1970's
* Aerosmith - Train Kept a Rollin' (Cover)
* Black Sabbath - Paranoid (Cover)
* Blue Oyster Cult - Don't Fear the Reaper
* Boston - Foreplay/Long Time
* David Bowie - Suffragette City
* Deep Purple - Highway Star
* KISS - Detroit Rock City
* Mountain - Mississippi Queen (Cover)
* The Outlaws - Green Grass & High Tides (Cover)
* The Police - Next to You
* The Ramones - Blitzkrieg Bop
* Sweet - Ballroom Blitz (Cover)
* The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again
1980's
* Bon Jovi - Wanted Dead or Alive
* The Clash - Should I Stay or Should I Go
* Faith No More - Epic
* Iron Maiden - Run to the Hills (Cover)
* Pixies - Wave of Mutilation
* R.E.M. - Orange Crush
* Rush - Tom Sawyer (Cover)
1990's
* Beastie Boys - Sabotage
* Foo Fighters - L earn to Fly
* Garbage - I Think I'm Paranoid
* Hole - Celebrity Skin
* Metallica - Enter Sandman
* Nirvana - In Bloom
* Radiohead - Creep
* Smashing Pumpkins - Cherub Rock
* Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun
* Stone Temple Pilots - Vasoline
* Weezer - Say it Ain't So
2000's
* Coheed & Cambria - Welcome Home
* Fall Out Boy - Dead on Arrival
* The Hives - Main Offender
* Jet - Are You Gonna be My Girl
* The Killers - When You Were Young
* New Pornographers - Electric Version
* Nine Inch Nails - The Hand That Feeds
* OK Go - Here it Goes Again
* Queens of the Stone Age - Go with the Flow
* Red Hot Chili Peppers - Dani California
* The Strokes - Reptilia
* Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps
If your new to music games(where the hell have you been?) I'll explain how it works. Well, you use a plastic instrument and watch notes fly by on a chart and match them. When the color comes by, hold it down and strum. There are chords, where you have to hold down more than one button and strum them both and held notes, where you have to hold the button down until the line on the note ends. In the harder difficulties of guitar you will have to do hammer-ons and pull-offs in which you h ave to hit the first note in the hammer-on and you are not required to hit the other buttons. These are indicated by notes that are smaller in size than the other notes. Overdrive, which doubles your multiplier, which is increased by the more notes you hit consecutively without missing any notes.
If you've played games like SingStar you know how the vocals work. The vocals are at the top of the screen, and the lyrics of the song with scroll buy horizontally, and you will have to sing them at the right pitch and volume. The mic does a good job of detecting of the pitch of what you are singing, but not such a great job detecting of what the words are. You can easily sing the songs by just humming. During solos and sections of songs without vocals you will sometimes have to hit the microphone with your hand to make a beat to match the board, but if you don't want to do this there is no point or streak penalty if you don't. Overdrive, in the vocals is activated by making a loud sound when an overdrive phrase passes through.
And the drum gameplay is pretty simple, but it gets ridiculously hard and complicated in the hard and expert difficulties, but anyone could play on easy. But be warned, if you haven't played real drums it'll take you some hardcore practicing to be able to play on expert. There are four colors, red, yellow, blue, and green, in order, and an orange drum pedal. The buttons are mapped to the pads and activate when you hit them, with whatever the hell you want, your hands, the official Rock Band drum sticks, or your head. The foot pedal is a orange bar across the screen, which sometimes will have to be hit in sync with a button, or two buttons. Overdrive in drums is activated by hitting fills, which are free-style sections where you can do whatever you want. At the end of a fill there will be a green button, and if you hit that, overdrive is activated.
One of the most important aspects of a music game is the peripherals. The peripherals are pretty solid, except you may not find them as durable as Guitar Hero peripherals. The strum bar on the Guitar is pretty flimsy, and the buttons are all next to each other, with no space in between. They also make a rather annoying click sound. The Guitar has a switch that you can use to make the guitar sounds sound different, which is a kind of cool but completely unnecessary feature. The start button, as far as I can tell is pretty unresponsive, though. The whammy bar seems to break pretty easily, as well.
Without having another drum peripheral to compare Rock Band's drum set to it seems pretty good. The drum pads nor the drum pedal show no sign whatsoever of unresponsiveness. The drum pedal is, however, plastic and a little bit weak. If you play the drums a lot you may find it breaking out you. But other than that, the drums are very solid. Harmonix is offering a warranty with the game on the drums, guitar, and mic, so keep that in mind.
The microphone is... just a microphone. It's nothing special, and it doesn't even have any buttons on it. You have to use your controller to navigate through the menus if you want to sing. This is a nuisance, it would've been nice if Harmonix would've included a voice-controlled system, where you can say what song you wanted to pick, the difficult of the song, or whatever into the mic.
Rock Band, at it's funnest, is when you have friends over with you, preferably drunk, playing Rock Band. This is what World Tour mode is for. You can play a single-player career too, but it's funner with a few people. World Tour is a lot more complicated than any other music game career we've ever seen before. First you create your character. There is a full character creator, which hasn't been in any music games before this. The character creator is pretty deep, with customizable faces, hair, and clothes. You can also put face paint and tattoos on your character.
After you create the character(s) you can star World Tour mode. You will just start out with one gig and you will only be able to play one song at a time, but as you move to bigger cities and bigger gigs you will get to play setlists, featuring five or six songs at a time. And, the final setlist, "The Endless Setlist", will have you playing every single song in the game, one after another. Yeah... that'll take awhile.
Unfortunately you can't play World Tour mode online. But you can do point contests and tug of wars, and band mode. The band mode is just world tour, but you can only play on song and it doesn't feature the whole city/gig system in it. And the other two are just competitive modes.
Rock Band has had and will continue to have amazing DLC support. Continue to looks for more and more songs coming every week from Harmonix.
Final Decision
Rock Band is an amazing game. It's the best music game there is, and if you liked the Guitar Hero games, you'll love this, and you'll have a lot of fun with it. It's Guitar Hero and much, much, more. If you haven't played Guitar Hero then this will probably make your jaw-drop, as it did with everyone else when they originally played Guitar Hero on the Playstation 2. This is a much-buy for anyone who loves music.
