Rock Band Review

By Ned Jordan

How do you follow the incredibly popular Guitar Hero games? By bringing in the rest of the band, of course. The developer responsible for the first two Guitar Hero games, Harmonix, now brings us Rock Band, a game in which you not only have the chance to be a virtual guitar hero, but a drum god or singing star as well. The cover charge for this band is not cheap, though. For $170 you get a guitar, the drum kit, and a mic along with a copy of the game, and you'll still need to pick up another guitar if you want to fill out your band with a bassist. That's a lot of money to be sure, but odds are that you'll get a lot more mileage out of this game than most. We'd all like to forget about a few games that we've spent $70 on only to regret it a half hour into the game (or less!). If you already own a Guitar Hero game for the Xbox 360, then you'll be able to save the cost of the second guitar because the Guitar Hero guitars are compatible with Rock Band. You can even just pick up the game on its own and play just the guitar parts to save some scratch, but then you'd miss out on the primal joy of pounding out the beat on the drums.

There is a lot to Rock Band, which while good for the gamer is not so good for the reviewer because it's going to take a bit of work on my part to touch on everything. I suppose the best place to start is at the beginning and let you know what you are in store for after bringing the sizable Rock Band box home and dumping its contents on your living room floor. The first thing that you'll notice is that none of the instruments are wireless. To get around the four instrument cables and two USB ports dilemma, Rock Band provides a mini USB hub with four ports. You plug the instruments into the ports and the hub into the 360. There is a downside to this solution in addition to the reintroduction of wires into your formerly wireless videogame domain, namely that the USB hub is powered and needs to be plugged in while you play. For me this is always a bit of a hassle because available plug space is at a premium and I loathe having to untangle wires as I reroute cords and struggle with power bricks, but it may or may not be an issue for you.

If you've ever held a Guitar Hero 3 controller then you'll instantly feel a deep familiarity with the Rock Band guitar. You have a flipper for your strum bar to simulate the plucking of strings, color coded buttons on the fret bar, and a whammy bar. The Rock Band guitar feels a bit heavier and more solidly built than the Guitar Hero guitar, but the differences go beyond the feel of the two guitars. The Rock Band guitar's fret buttons are flush with the handle and are only color-coded on the tops of the buttons. This gives the controller a more realistic look, but it also gives it a different feel for those used to playing Guitar Hero. The Guitar Hero buttons stand out from the handle and so there's some separation between the buttons, but on the Rock Band guitar the separation does not feel as pronounced. This isn't that big a deal if you play at easy or medium, or even at hard in most cases, but expert level video guitarists may have to go through a short adjustment period. It will also take a short adjustment period to get used to the strum bar. The Rock Band guitar's strum bar does not have the characteristic clack of its Guitar Hero cousin and feels a lot softer.

The Rock Band guitar also sports a few new features not found on the Guitar Hero guitar. The first is an extra set of fret buttons near the base of the handle. They're there to make the guitar easier to use for younger players and for older players who want to really get into their solos. There's also an effects switch which changes the sound of the guitar. It's not too easy to switch between the five effects while playing, but it is cool how you can change the sound of the guitar to match the style of the song that you're playing. Once you've played through the song list a few times you'll begin to settle on your preferred sound for each song and just set the switch before you begin playing.

The drum kit will require a bit of assembly out of the box, but it's not too complicated to set it up. You get four drum pads that sit on top of an adjustable stand and a bass drum peddle that hooks on to the stand's cross bar and attaches to the drum set with a cable. The center of the pad features all of the standard controller buttons including an Xbox 360 guide button, so you can just sit at the drums and control the game from there. It's difficult to sit on a couch and play the drums as they require you to sit a little higher, especially if you don't want your calf to cramp up halfway through a song from using the bass pedal.

The mic is a standard USB mic and doesn't include any control features or take up one of the 360's four available controller spots. You'll need to have an Xbox 360 controller on hand to navigate the menus if you're running the game from the mic.

Once you've got everything hooked up you're ready to play and can form a band and begin a new career, or just start playing a song. If you begin a band career then you'll start by picking a band name and creating characters for each of your band members. The character creation tool in the game is pretty powerful, allowing you to style your avatar as a goth, punk, metalhead, or rocker. You don't get Tiger Wood's Gameface style tools, but the number of heads, hairstyles, and outfits available - and the ability to change their colors - makes it pretty easy to create a unique look that you'll be happy with. Once you're on tour and earning money you'll be able to buy even more styles, clothes, and accessories. One minor gripe with the character creation tool came from our female band members in that the camera zoomed in on the area being customized, making it difficult for them to determine things such as whether or not their shoes matched their belt or hair color.

A bigger issue with the in-game characters is not an issue with the creation tool itself, but with a design decision about the characters. Each character created becomes tied to an instrument, so if you create a drummer and want to play guitar on the next song you can't use your drummer character. This leaves you with the option of creating a different character for each instrument or using a randomly generated one, but in either case you'll need to back a few screens out of career mode to swap characters. Or you can do what we did; just switch instruments and play as each other's characters. I suppose that the developers thought that it would be more realistic if each character could only specialize in one instrument, but the game is far from a rock band sim so why impose this one realistic touch on a game that's pure fantasy anyway?

Now there are a lot of things to the career mode that are pretty cool and make Rock Band more than just Guitar Hero with additional instruments. Your band's success is measured not only in the scores you achieve on the songs, but in the number of fans you attract and, as you get bigger, in the size of the venues in which you play. You also begin to accumulate roadies, better tour busses, and all the trappings of a big time rock band. All of these things are basically numbers on your stats page and it would have been great to see your entourage and possessions in some sort of graphical way, but it's still a lot of fun to see how many fans a good performance attracted and how many you lost with a bad one. The loading screens in the career mode are also pretty cool. They show your band members in candid shots or staged cheesy rock poses. It's pretty cool to your band name emblazoned on a billboard with your faces below it.