After a rather long and frustrating wait, the EU was finally given tickets to Rockband on the 23rd of May. Rockband being EA's prime time foray (after Boom Boom Rocket) into the exciting world of the rhythm game genre.
With Guitar Hero being one of the biggest selling games of all time and the necessary guitar peripheral sales bringing tidy amounts of profit it was only a matter of time before EA wanted a slice of that pie, buying out the original creators of Guitar Hero -Harmonix.
Rockband at first inspection seems nothing special other than an unimaginative rip-off but aims and succeeds (for the most part) at doing everything in a better and bigger scale. Yes you can play guitar along with tracks as you can in GH, but now you can also sing along just like in Singstar. Still not enough? how about the ultimate selling pitch - drums. Who doesn't at sometime tap along to whatever tune their hearing? Combine these assets along with every song on the disc being a master track, unlike GH's rather dodgy covers. Huge customisation options and a truely endless array of multi player options; online leaderboards, band world tours, score duels. You name it, if you ever wished Guitar Hero could do something it didn't offer chances are Rockband has it.
As there is ultimately 3 disciplines in Rockband, it makes sense for me to cover them each seperately.
Guitar:
If you ever played the Guitar Hero games previously you'll be right at home with how this system works. Using either the game branded Stratocaster (or any of the GH guitars) a fretboard scrolls down your screen with coloured dots indicating which of the corresponding buttons should be held down on your controller and strummed according to the song in question.
On easy levels you'll only be using 3 of the 5 buttons and more complicated manoeuvres such as chords, hammer-ons and pull-offs are left well out of reach until you advance towards later difficulty levels. The note lists are constructed well with otherwise quite boring songs being made fun and endearing to play.
Rockband introduces guitar solos and BRE's (big rock endings). In which if you're in possession of the rockband strat you can use the top frets without the need to stum the bar to build your points up with great ease (and posturing).
One major note of criticism however is the games implementation of hammer-ons and pull-offs.Guitar Hero 3 recently made a great improvement to this with lowering the precision needed to perform this technique and as a result improved the playability factor immensely. Here on Rockband however it still feels very loose if it will register correctly. A minor gripe which can be overcome with practise, but it still feels stuck in the past compared to where the GH series is now.
It's also worth pointing out that compared to Guitar Hero 3 the game is quite a big deal easier. While this might be good news to those that struggled even completing medium on that game, to those who finished in the top scores on expert it's a real game shortner. Expert can be compared to Hard and with the exception of some downloadable tracks all but 2 of the 45 standard songs on the disc could be 5 starred on expert first go around.
Microphone:
Using either the official Rockstar microphone, any USB mic or even the 360 headset. The vocal mode is a great addition to a game of this type. It works almost exactly the same as Sonys 'Singstar'. With the words scrolling alongside pitchbars to which the aim is to sync up as close as possible. Thankfully you don't have to sing in the same key as long as the pitch of the word is correct. Occasionally you also have to strike the microphone in-time with a tambourine or cowbell, although rare they are a fun addition and add to the illusion of being a front man in a rock group.
The problem with the singing option in the game is that as voice recognition isn't exactly at the level of the human ear (if you have ever used naturally speaking on a PC you will fully understand). You can essentially spout any old nonsense and as long as the timing and pitch is correct it will still register as correct. This makes the higher scores on the game leaderboard suspiciously illegit and the truely talented singers using the game might feel a bit cheated as a result.
This doesn't mean that it's easy though, getting high scores on even medium is a real challenge. Expert being near on impossible. In terms of a multiplayer setting, having someone able to sing vocals who might otherwise shy away from drums or guitar is a welcome option.
Drums:
The drums for most if not all people are the major selling point for the game. Note patterns fall in a similar fashion to that of the guitar with 4 drumpads and a kick pedal being the equivalent of your coloured buttons on the guitar.
The note patterns are very accurate and realistic (only dismissing very fast kick triplets) and those competent with playing drums in real life should be able to get through medium and hard modes in a breeze. Expert is a whole different story however, there you'll need second by second analysis of what's happening to prevent from failing miserably.
Luckily the practice mode for drums (as well as the other instruments) is incredibly useful with the option to slow the song down in percentages and in real time rather than just slow & slower. Compared to Rockband, it's a great improvement.
The huge almost gamebreaking problem with the drums is infact the drums themselves.
Obviously with real electronic kits costing upto £1000+ a £70 kit isn't going to be quite as efficient. The problem with Rockbands is that it's downright rubbish.
The drum pads are incredibly loud & un-sensitive (going by an EL model - the standard for the EU) and the red pad in particular (which acts as the snare) needs quite severe end user modification to function effectively on any difficulty level past easy or medium. Completing a song with 98-99% notes hit and still scoring only 3/5 stars due to the inability to keep a combo thanks to notes not registering on the kit is about as emotionally draining and annoying as a user experience gets.
America apparently have better made kits these days but having tried 3 myself now, it seems all kits being shipped in the EU have this problem. The kick pedal is also very fragile and I personally found that the spring doesn't have enough push back. Playing through on expert it felt like my ankle was doing the work of the spring most the time.
Overall it's very disappointing, if your playing in a multiplayer group where getting a perfect score isn't as important as passing then it's still fun to bash around on. But as the solo mode is score-based here it fails miserably. A huge disappointment.
Back to the game itself;
I touched on the customisation options earlier on. Unlike in Guitar Hero where you had to select from a handful of pre-rendered characters, here you really can create your own rock god/goddess. A rockshop provides the front to decide whether your character is going to be Rock, Metal or Goth and as a result offers haircuts, tattoos (which the user can layer and edit) and clothes to make this person exactly how you envision. You buy and unlock further options by earning money from completing songs in single and multiplayer career modes.
The songlist tends to make or break the game and Rockband really pisses all over Guitar Hero in terms of having the original songs on offer rather than cover versions. The online store is also regularly updated every week and has something for everyone on offer at reasonable prices.
The only criticism being that although a number of huge bands are represented it never seems to be their most famous hits that are chosen as their game song. While sometimes this is addressed in the additional downloadable track packs why they couldn't have been chosen as the on-disc song comes across a bit miserly. It's also come to the point where 3 guitar hero games previous, alot of 'big' songs have already been done per-se. A handful of tracks on Rockband have already appeared on Guitar Heroes which makes playing through them another umpteenth amount of times somewhat tedious.
The multiplayer options are outstanding. Band world tour encourages you to routinely get together with the same people in the aim of increasing fans by performing songs and preset set-lists at different difficulty levels. The only gripe about this is that there isn't an online function to recruit band members as it has to be all done locally. Fine if you have people nearby competent with the game, otherwise (like me) your fucked.
There are single player online modes such as 'Score Duel' which has each player competing for the biggest score, and 'Tug Of War' where the person who keeps a combo the longest comes out on top.
Although both fun, a game breaking problem with these is the ability for a player to quit out at any moment. Rather than register as a win for the remaining player it simply just restarts them back to the menu. Therefore. all the sore losers who four minutes through a song see no way of coming back to win simply quit out preventing the other from a victory.
Why this hasn't been patched by now is beyond me considering the amount of time it's been out in the US. Truly shocking. Other than going for achievements it makes you want to avoid these play modes altogether and aim instead at improving you position on the solo scoreboards where other peoples bad sense of sportsmanship won't ruin your game.
Overall Rockband is certainly a fun and ambitious game. Despite poor quality and expensive peripherals, easy guitar note charts and a less than stellar song listing, the improvements it still manages to make over Guitar Hero are immense. It's due to these improvements infact that Guitar Hero are now introducing drums into the next iteration of their own franchise as well as mastertracks. Until we can see how that pans out it's more than worth the money if your a fan of rhythm games or music in general to book a gig with Rockband.
Good: Numerous game options, master tracks, addition of vocals & drums to GH formula.
Bad: Difficulty swings towards the easy side, poor quality peripherals, no online band tour