by  PangTong_Blademaster
from Oxford, , England | Jul 20, 2008 |
Last year music games hit an all time high note with Guitar Hero III making huge sales on all four of the big consoles. Then we had games such as Singstar for the PS3 which also sold tremendously well. It is games like these that may be a small novelty but hell do they ship a lot of them. The next big music game to hit the shop floors is indeed Rock Band. Though up by the same guys who did Guitar Hero, Rock Band is the ultimate music game that offers four different instruments to play, character customisation, a world tour mode and to top it off; online play. The only downfall you ask? The price of course. I managed to get my copy shipped to the UK from the US, it was the “special edition box” and came with the Fender guitar, the wired drum kit and the wired microphone which all came to a healthy £145 including postage. I had a hard time deciding on whether to hand out that amount of cash and it will be harder for a lot more gamers out there too. So is Rock Band as big of a success than Guitar Hero last year? Read on and find out.
Gameplay
Anyone who has had a run in with any of the Singstar or Guitar Hero games will already have a vivid idea of how Rock Band plays out. Rock Band has four play styles,: guitar, bass guitar, drum kit and microphone all of which play a vital role in how a song is played. When playing with the guitars you will notice five coloured buttons both at the top end of the fretboard and nearer the bottom. When playing Rock Band a virtual fretboard will be displayed on screen with a highlighted bar at the bottom of the screen. Coloured notes will descend from the top of the screen and as they pass the highlighted bar, players are required to press the corresponding coloured button and strum at the same time. Timing is crucial in Rock Band, if you miss one note in a long chain it’s likely your going to miss the next two or three as well so make sure you keep your eyes on the colour of the notes and watch how quickly or slowly they fall. Next is the microphone, when playing a song a bar will appear at the top of the screen. As the song starts, lyrics to the song will move across the screen towards another highlighted bar. When the words touch the bar the player is required to say that word at the right pitch as it passes through. This can be an especially hard task because when I played through on the microphone the lyrics game too fast for me and I couldn’t keep in pitch. However there is another way around singing by simply humming into the mic. The only flaw with the singing is the positioning of the bar, with friends on my PSN friendlist constantly logging in and out all the time it masks the next words of the song. Last but not least is the most anticipated peripheral, that’s right the drum kit! On the drum kit is four coloured pads and a foot pedal. The drum kit comes with two wooden drum sticks with the Rock Band logo. The drums work very similarly to the guitar as in terms of hitting the right coloured pad as the note descend to the bottom of the screen. The only difference in the foot pedal, instead of there being a fifth column on the play screen the occasional thin orange horizontal line will fall along with the notes and when it reaches the bottom the player is prompted to press the pedal. In easier difficulties the drum can be a challenge to start off with like the other instruments but if I have to point out the highlight of Rock Band it would definitely be the drum kit.
So how does the game differ from Guitar Hero apart from the peripherals? Firstly the play screen is different, instead of having your scorer perched on a little amp it is plastered at the bottom of the screen. The multiplier is still there though, it allows you to double, triple or quadruple you scores if you manage to play a chain of notes in succession. It still only goes up to four but this makes it still fairly easy to get and gives the scoring balance. Another thing that has stayed the same is the star rating but this time it shows you when you have earned a star and how far you have to go instead of just giving you it at the end with a scorecard.
Game modes in Rock Band include the Solo modes and Multiplayer modes each with quickplay and world tour modes. In Quicklplay mode you simply choose an instrument to play, choose a song to play and play it on any difficulty you want. Same applies to the multiplayer apart from two players cant choose the same type of instrument. The World Tour mode is what excited me the most. In the world tour you get to travel the world and play gigs at all different venues from Rio to Rome, from Amsterdam to New York City. Just like in Guitar Hero you will have a set list to complete before moving onto different venues which at times can seem like a bore especially if the songs you are playing to complete a setlist don’t appeal to you. Also there is another blow for bass guitar fans because Rock Band doesn’t do a Bass world tour. The best thing about world tour is your own made up rocker. You can make either a singer, drummer or guitarist. There are loads of different combinations of make up, tattoos, face paints, hair dos, clothes and instruments to customise your rocker. One of my own personal rockers is styled around God of War’s Kratos and it bears a striking resemblence (I will add pictures later).
The only aspect of Gameplay I am not pleased with is the online modes. It may not be very populated at the moment but when you do manage to join a game, the host is always the one selecting the song and difficulty so if I want to play “Maps” on extreme I will have to make do with “Blitzkrieg Bop” on easy. Apart from that there is not a lot to expand on in terms of the online experience.
Visuals and Sound
The graphics are definitely an improvement since Guitar Hero’s cartoony characters and venues. Rockers look quite realistic and so do the venues along with the crowd who don’t all look exactly the same and we 2D as they were in Guitar Hero. Explosions will occur during songs and there is a lovely pyrotechnics display at the end of the world tour. Sound is spot on, and as I said in my Guitar Hero III review no one could drag how good this game sounds through the dirt. Each instrument sounds louder if you are the one playing it which is very nice especially if you are the bassist of the group. There are 58 songs in Rock Band and thousands (I literally mean thousands) more to download via the PSN store. You will notice classics such as “Paranoid” and “Suffragette City” but what I like is that Rock Band has taken the liberty in adding more recently released tracks such as “When You Were Young” by the Killers and “Here It Goes Again” by Ok Go.
Highlights
Overall, Rock Band is the ultimate musical experience. It has a variety of modern and old tracks, the Gameplay has been perfected since Guitar Hero III and the “create a rocker” feature tops it all off. Even if I just blew £145 it went to a good cause as I believe Rock Band unlike so many other games has a staggering replay value. One little downside however is that Rock Band can rarely be enjoyed by yourself, get yours friends over and start a band, now!
Top three highlights of Rock Band:
1. Playing “Dani California” on the drum kit.
2. Playing as my cutsom Kratos look-a-like bassist.
3. Getting the singer crowd surfed.
Graphics: 3.7/5.0 -- Better than Guitar Hero III but nothing too mindblowing.
Gameplay: 4.5/5.0 -- Enhanced with the two new peripherals but still not perfect.
Sound: 4.8/ 5.0 -- Spot on in terms of quality but a better play list would have been nice.
Design: 4.0/ 5.0 -- Retaining a little bit of wackiness from Guitar Hero but more realistic.
Story: N/A
Lifespan: 4.8/ 5.0 -- As long as you have friends and a heavy PSN wallet, the fun never ends.
Online: 3.0/ 5.0 -- Dodgy game modes and the lack of choosing your settings, stick with your mates. |
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