Months ago, Konami made sure the gaming world knew that they were the first company to develop the plastic-instrument music genre. Sadly, Rock Revolution only reminds everyone that being the first does not exactly make you the best. Konami's ahead-of-their time arcade music games, like DrumMania, may have provided the inspiration for Guitar Hero, and eventually Rock Band, but Rock Revolution feels like a cheap Dollar Store knock-off. Rock Revolution might more accurately named 'Middling Cover Band', since only two (Linkin Park's "Given Up" and Finger Eleven's "Paralyzer") of the forty-one tracks are the original recordings. The rest of the tracks are covers that range from passable to infuriatingly terrible.
The rendition of The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" is the worst offender, with one of the worst attempts at a cover ever captured. The song selection itself is varied, but seems to tilt more toward eighties metal and glam rock, leaving most contemporary rock behind. Most of what is not pulled from the eighties looks like the playlist of a late-nineties alt-rock station, with blink-182, Papa Roach, and Korn littering the list. Well, truthfully, you will have to know the names of the artists for each song on your own, since the game never gives you anything other than a song title. The graphics are not much better than the song quality, with incredibly bland venues, generic looking bandmates, and an army of clones as fans.
The game completely ignores the vocal aspect of the songs, though if the rest of the game is any indication it might be a relief. There are five difficulty levels to play, ratcheting up from incredibly easy to decently rough; though not reaching the toughness of Guitar Hero. Beginner on guitar actually gives you only the red and green buttons to play, which may make this a decent option for anyone with a youngster not quite able to grasp the more robust music games yet. Everyone else will be better off starting on medium to avoid falling asleep. Even on the lower difficulty settings, the extreme vertical layout of the note board creates problems. It is definitely more noticeable once you crank things up to hard, but without the familiar tilted note board the notes seem to fly by too quickly. It is not that the game is too hard, more that it is frustrating to play given the short time span between a note appearing on the top of the screen and hitting the bottom. Not that performance matters much with the broken rating system which awards just one star to both an 88% notes-hit performance on medium and 66% on hard.
The ugly interface is perhaps a bigger issue, as the game has no polish whatsoever. Clunky-looking notes look like neon gumballs and the long note streams for drum fills or held notes are just bland tubes of color. The note board and notes themselves also take up far too much territory on the screen, with the oversized look making it somewhat difficult to see the oncoming notes if you are in the middle of a held note. The notes in a single player game are well left of center, which becomes an issue since the 'atmosphere meter' tracking your performance is in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. The note board never gives you any indication that you are about to fail out of a song, so a quick glance at the meter is your only check on how you are doing. The tableture for each song feels accurate, but sluggish. There are too many open spaces and missed notes, even as you ramp up the difficulty. There are also too many times where hideous three string chords are used, with all three strings directly next to each other. The whammy bar on open notes sounds decidedly depressed, with no energy to the effect. Believe it or not, guitar works better than drums here.
