The basics of World Tour remain the same as in Rock Band - you start out
playing small clubs and earn stars to open up new cities, larger venues, and
unlock more songs to play. You can now hire promotional staff, but their affect
on the game isn't really noticeable, so you can just hire the best one available
and forget about it until someone new and better is unlocked. Career mode now
includes a separate challenge mode outside of the World Tour. This essentially
consists of a series of pre-set song lists for you to play and then compare your
score against the leaderboards for the challenge. Don't expect to find yourself
ranked too highly, though, unless you've got a band of expert level players
banging out 100 percents with regularity. If you are among this elite group,
you'll also appreciate the Battle of the Bands mode which lets you take on
another band head to head in a dual to score the most points.
There are a few other changes that have been made to the game, such as an
improved music browser that rates the difficulty level for each instrument in a
song in addition to rating the overall song difficulty. Probably the best of
these changes is the addition of a ‘no fail' option. This is a godsend for
casual players because you won't have to worry about one newbie player causing
the band to fail one song after another. This eliminates a lot of aggravation
and frustration, and turns Rock Band 2 into a true party game that everyone can
enjoy.
There are a few Rock Band issues that remain unchanged in 2. The career mode
is still somewhat bland and could use a little spicing up with cutscenes and the
like. Also, some of the background animations are too over-the-top and detract
from the gameplay. It can be tough to concentrate on your notes when the
background starts spinning and pulsating with psychedelic color (doubly so when
one of your band mates starts getting woozy and begins missing her notes). The
biggest outstanding issue though, is in the way the difficulty levels are
structured – there is too big a gap between ‘medium' and ‘hard'. To many
players, the medium setting can be boring, with minimal use of chords and a
feeling of disconnect with the music you're playing. There just aren't enough
notes at this setting. Move to hard and you get faster moving notes, the
addition of the fifth fret button, and a marked increase in the total number of
notes to play. Players bored with medium may find themselves overwhelmed by the
nard setting on many songs. There needs to be a happy median here.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
94%. Rock Band was just the opening act. Rock Band
2 is the real headliner.
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