Does Anyone Still Care?: A Rock Band 3 Review
It has been a solid 2 years since Rock Band 2 was released and no other music game has even come close to eclipsing its quality, design and polish. Harmonix is now back with Rock Band 3, and a slew of new features, but with rhythm game popularity waning is their effort too much too late?I say too much because the sheer amount of options and features and instruments and modes in Rock Band 3 can be terribly overwhelming. Harmonix really took a kitchen sink approach to Rock Band 3 and because of this it almost seems like a farewell to the Rock Band franchise.
Starting from the top, Rock Band 3’s interface has been completely redesigned. Aspects of the Guitar Hero 5 interface that were successful, I.E. the drop in drop out feature and the existence of an over shell that manages each players logins separately have been added. Its odd seeing Harmonix borrowing from Neversoft, since its usually the other way around, but when something works, it works. I don’t know if the new interface flows “better”, since certain things could have been arranged more logically. Take the “Career” option on the menu for example. This doesn’t take you to Career mode, it takes you to your Career stats page. I know that’s a trivial thing to bring up when reviewing a game, but when you’ve established a nearly flawless gameplay experience and the only thing making the experience odd is menu structure, it deserves to be mentioned.
Small menu hitches like this are sprinkled throughout the game. Some functions that were traditionally found on the home menu of the game, are now mapped to the over-shell menu. This causes the first few hours to be full of very clumsy menu surfing . A few Achievement descriptions are too vague and can cause confusion over what exactly needs to be done. Also, it may be in the game, but I sure as hell can’t find a 1 to 1 achievement tracker progress page, like what is seen in The Beatles, Lego and Green Day Rock Bands. Sure, there’s a career achievement tracker area that gives you more info on your progress than would ever use, and many of those achievements are the Xbox Live Achievements, but surfing through 5 menus trying to find how many Rock Band 3 songs you’ve finished on Hard, when a dedicated Xbox live achievement menu progress section has been done before, by Harmonix, seems terribly excessive.
Sure, menu frustration will go away in time, and in the long run is a footnote on this stellar rhythm game release. Obviously the big additions to the game are “Pro” Instruments and the Keyboard. The Keyboard, designed by Madcatz is a solid piece of hardware that feels way more professional than any other piece of Rock Band hardware. However, the addition of the Keyboard elicits mixed reactions when playing.
As a standalone instrument, the keyboard is fantastic. The play modes built in encourage you to move to the higher levels and challenge yourself on Pro Keys. Standard Keys is lacking the depth needed to satiate your average Rock Band fan, since its, in essence, just like playing drums with your fingers. Pro Keys on the other hand is a monster that quickly welcomes you to play it on easy. After playing Pro Keys you simply can’t go back to Standard Keys.
In Pro-Key mode, you play on up to ten of the white keys at a time along with the black keys within the range of the designated white keys. The track seen on the screen will indicate exactly which of the white and/or black keys to play. It is not an approximated or abstract version of a keyboard, it IS a keyboard. As you raise the difficulty in Pro Mode the game will become increasingly more like playing the actually song on Keyboard. Whether this will lead to actual keyboard learning has yet to be seen, but Harmonix has made it very clear that if you want to learn to play these songs in real life, these are the buttons you have to press. Most importantly Pro Keys is fun. The entire game could be played single player and the experience would mirror that of a person picking up Guitar Hero 1 for the first time. That is a magical feeling and the last time I felt it was with the DJ Hero turntable.
The downside to the keyboard is that if you already own a substantial amount of DLC, like me, Rock Band Parties become very complicated and confusing for casual players. Everyone wants to use the keyboard, but they don’t understand why many of the memorable keyboard songs in my library don’t have support for the peripheral. Songs like Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing”, La Roux’s “Bulletproof” and Gorillaz “Clint Eastwood” are prime examples of songs that NEED to be patched. It looks like Harmonix knows this, but hasn’t made any announcements on the process of doing so or possible pricing.
To add to this confusion, if a song doesn’t have keys support, the keyboard can be used to play the guitar or bass parts…but not if the guitar and/or bass parts are already being played by guitar wielding players. Many songs had to be completed with the keyboard “dropped out” of the song. This would be fine if there were an easier way to replace it with vocals. Since the Xbox 360 can only support 4 controllers a crucial concession had to be made with the vocal support. If all four instruments are turned on, the vocal track is no longer scored and is placed into “Karaoke Mode”. This doesn’t seem like a big deal at first, but if the keyboard has to be dropped out of a song there is no easy way to replace it with a scored vocal track. This is uber frustrating when trying to explain it players that don’t understand the technical limitations of the hardware. This partially can be blamed on the xbox itself, but there are software ways to work around it that are not in place.
Well, look at me, talked for over a thousand words now and most of my comments have been negative aspects of nit-picky parts of Rock Band 3. Let’s look at the great sides to the game. The soundtrack is what it should be. You are probably not going to like every song on it but you’re not supposed to. It covers thepast 5 decades pretty evenly, and includes many bona-fide classics. Highlights include Chicago “25 or 6 to 4”, John Lennon “Imagine”, The Doobie Brothers “China Grove”, Whitesnake “Here I Go Again”, Roxette “The Look”, Smash Mouth “Walkin’ on the Sun” and Amy Winehouse “Rehab”, but Rock Band 3 falls victim to what Guitar Hero Warriors of Rock did earlier this year. Many of the bands included on disc already have large libraries of music available in other games and as DLC. Bands like Slipknot, Paramore, Tom Petty, The Who, Stone Temple Pilots, The Police, Avenged Sevenfold, and Queens of the Stone Age, amongst others, are all heavily featured in rhythm games already, so adding another song to the library is not really a “Get” if you know what I mean. Overall I was pleased with the tracks and I’m looking forward to seeing what other songs by these artists Harmonix licensed for DLC later on. If you’re listening…more Elton John, Huey Lewis and the News, Def Leppard and The Doobie Brothers please.
Pro Drums are a fantastic addition to the game and seem to be the feature with the most bang for your buck (pun intended). Any set of cymbals and/or extra kick pedals you have can be used in Pro-drum mode. The note tracks are modified to indicate a cymbal crash instead of a drum beat. The change may seem simple, but it makes a huge difference. Drums have never felt more authentic, and the best part is that damn near every song ever coded for a rock band game has Pro Drums support. So, you drummers out there that have already conquered the Rock Band 1 and 2 songs, and the DLC…its time to step up your game, you have 200 thousand songs to conquer again.
Pro Guitar/Bass was not available to the Techpedition staff at the time of review, but even without it, Rock Band 3 stands alone as the largest and most in depth and polished rhythm game ever released. I am playing a lot of games this holiday season…a lot, but I can say definitively that Rock Band 3 is the only one that will make it into the New Year and well beyond.
Where do they go from here? Harmonix’s all in effort on Rock Band 3 brings to question, what is next for the Rock Band franchise. Consumer interest in the genre as a whole has been declining for about 2 years now. Sure, Harmonix might have just built themselves a safety net in Dance Central, but can we really expect the huge additions to the established formula to reinvigorate stagnating rhythm game sales? Pro mode is great, but it will only appeal to a very small portion of the core audience. My fear is that games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band have reached the Creed zone. The once hugely popular band Creed, is now the butt of endless “worst band ever” jokes…I predict that Nickelback is next in line for this treatment. No matter what the quality of the next Creed album is, nothing short of an act of God could reinvigorate Creed fandom.
The seemingly never ending feature list in Rock Band 3 is also a key player in the pick up and playability of the game. When a new customer visits Amazon.com to pick up Rock Band 3, they are presented with such a vast variety of options, that unless the consumer is informed, they will probably skip over the purchase and something less daunting. It Rock Band 3’s case, its biggest asset could also be its downfall.
Unfortunately Rock Band has already past through the zeitgeist of pop culture and on its was out. Even when playing Rock Band 3 with other players I found the players oddly disconnected from the experience. Rather than being the focus of the party, Rock Band became an activity that loosely joined a group friends looking to have a good time. If its time is up and Rock Band 3 is instrument based rhythm gaming’s swan song, its great to see it end with the greatest rhythm game ever made.
Verdict: More game than you will ever play…ever.
