Lastly comes the all-important drum set, the new and never before done instrument that put Rock Band on the map in the first place. From the moment the game was announced I had decided that I was going to be a drum player, first and foremost. I would check out the other options but my main single and multiplayer experience would come in the form of drums. Let me start of by saying the drums are hard to play, both in real life and in Rock Band. The drum set is made up of four different circles that can be hit with the included wooden drumsticks and a foot pedal. Having started off at the easiest difficulty and slowly but surely moving up to medium and then hard I am now a strong believer in the theory of “practice makes perfect”. Rock Band actually rewards practice and a player’s drum skills will surely grow the more they play the game. The real difficulty comes in with the foot pedal, it is weirdly placed in the middle of the two stand poles and can be really hard to hit at some times. I found it much better to disconnect it from the drum set and set it out to the side, the entirely too short cord that connects the foot pedal to the main drum set caused many problems with this but I eventually figured out something that worked for me. Everything (height, distance, etc.) when setting up the drum set is very important because whether or not you enjoy playing the drums in Rock Band has a lot to do with if you are successful at it. Because there is not another drum game out there (serious competitor) to really compare Rock Band to I can only go on what I experienced here and overall it was a lot of fun. My one main complaint with the drums is that when banging on them with the wooden sticks it can get so freaking loud that the actual song is hard to hear, my solution to this was to turn up the sound on my stereo really loud but it would have been better had the actual drums been made out of something other than hard plastic. The drums take the game to a new level that a guitar or microphone could not have done. Out of the four instruments I liked the drums the most but that may have been because I have done the other two many times before and needed something brand new to pull me back into the music genre of video games.
The main career mode of Rock Band takes your band through a series of venues and popularity levels until they are at the top of all the charts and selling out football stadiums for their concerts. Each different venue has a selection of songs to play and once the career is completed all songs are unlocked in free play mode. Because Rock Band was always meant to be played with others there is also the Band World Tour (BWT) mode that can only be accessed if at least two human players are present. At the time of this review this mode can only be played locally but down the road there will be a patch allowing it to be done online (basically creating an entirely new single player experience). Rock Band features a pretty good character creation system, nothing revolutionary but it gets the job done and is much more rewarding than Guitar Hero’s character selection process. Once your band is created you get your first gig at a small rundown bar with only a few pre-selected songs to play. Do well and you get stars, get enough stars and your fans will follow your band to bigger and better places. The really neat thing happens when you get to start customizing your set lists, playing whatever music you want and trying to get the crowd into it. Everything is not predetermined in BWT for example if you blow a couple songs later on in your band’s career the fans will take notice, and start listening to something else. Certain venues and songs are only available when your band reaches a certain level of fame and because this level fluctuates things can be ripped away from you that you have already accessed making the mode as realistic as we have seen to date.
This mode is so much more (manager, roadies, tour bus, PR firm, challenges, charity events, etc.) than what we have seen from music games before that we really wish we could talk more about it. The only thing that you really need to know is there is nothing out there like the Band World Tour and the mode alone is enough reason to buy Rock Band and play through it with a buddy. Rock Band is not Harmonix’s first time around the block making a game of this type so it came as no surprise when the graphics and presentation are the best we have seen yet. While the actual notes and music lines are quite simple everything else is over the top and fantastic looking. The band members themselves have a really cool “glow” to them that causes them to stand out on the screen. Stand out they must because some of the venues are really loud visually, while not standing up to a few of the transformed GH3 stages they are still really fun to watch. The lip-synching is done with as much precision as possible as is the actual instrument playing. Everything looks like it is really going on and at the same time being controlled by the player’s actions. Right on par with everything else in this game is the sound. The track list is easily the best to date in any music game and being updated on a daily basis via Xbox Live pricy downloads. To go along with the name Rock Band most of the tracks are straight out of the Rock and Roll Greatest Hits catalog but there are a few surprises in there that are worth the trouble it takes to unlock them. Booming out of a good surround sound system this game can easily be mistaken for an actual CD or MP3 and all of the instruments sound great, the only thing we would change is a more intrusive sound for when a note is missed.
