If you've been keeping up with the channel, or just myself in particular, you may have caught on that I quite like Rock Band. A lot. I've been known to say that Rock Band 3 is my favorite game of all time, and I'd still say it today WHOOPS spoiler alert!
Lemme run down the basics. Harmonix have pretty much pioneered the rhythm gaming genre into the juggernaut it is today, or rather what it was five years ago before everyone stopped giving a shit about plastic instruments. They were the kings of karaoke! From Karaoke Revolution to Guitar Hero to Rock Band, they were the biggest name in the music genre. Playing fake instruments was near unheard of, but now it's streamlined in a wonderful way. The games were fun and posed a decent level of challenge to those who wanted it. Like me.
Rock Band 3 was released in 2010 and was really good. They expanded upon their previous iteration, Rock Band 2, in some very good ways. The keytar addition was cool, even if not many people used it. The inclusion of the harmony vocals from the Beatles: Rock Band was great, and it allowed up to 7 people to play at once. That rarely happened too, but it was great fun when it did. They supported the series until 3 years later when they released their final DLC song, American Pie, in 2013. Rock band had a library of over 3000 songs then. But for all we knew, the rhythm gaming genre was over.
Until this year! Five years later, Harmonix are coming out with a brand new Rock Band game! I was hyped. I still tried to play Rock Band 3 on occasion, but now it'd be on the new systems, and there'd be no hassle. After having it for a week, I knew everything I needed to know.
And oh how I was disappointed.
Here's the thing. If you play Rock Band for fun at a friend's place? Yeah, you'll probably enjoy this one. Hell, I enjoy this one because I still like Rock Band. And this is just that, but with more an incentive to play it. But it's not Rock Band 3. Not even close.
Very soon I noticed that the setlist kind of sucks. For me, it's got about 6 songs that I really like. Most bands have better music than the songs they chose. Hell, most bands have better songs in previous games. Like, Spiders by System of a Down. Great song. Weird choice. Really, that in your party rock band game?
At least you can bring in your whole previous libraries, right? Nope. As of now, only about 1700 DLC songs are available in Rock Band 4. You can't import any previous disc games. You can't import anything from Rock Band Network. Will we be able to in the future? Maybe, but Harmonix felt this game was ready for release now.
So the setlist is a bit thin, but how about everything else? It's equally as thin. Things from Rock Band 3 were scrapped almost randomly. Why can we not see the note streak we had in the song? Why can we not see each section's breakdown? Why is there no online play? Why is there no practice mode? All of these were in games back to Guitar Hero 2. Which was released in 2006.
Yeah, but how does the game actually play? Well, as I said before, it's Rock Band. The formula hasn't strayed too much. A new feature they've been touting is the new "freestyling." For vocals, this means singing something that's not the melody but still getting points. It's actually pretty all right. It's annoying how finicky it is for it to fully register, but it's a nice idea and it's implemented pretty well. Drums fills have been replaced with "dynamic" fills, pre-made fills made for each genre. They all suck. They sound not good. I like the static fills, which they thankfully included, but you can lose your streak in them. But if you have the classic fills, you can't. And classic fills are impossible with the amount of lag needed to calibrate out.
And then there are the guitar freestyle solos. In a way, it's impressive that the game can interpret constant mashing and strumming to try and make it go along with the song, and if you're drunk with a bunch of friends, it can be pretty funny. But it doesn't sound good. It sounds waaaaay worse than the original solos they replace.
And yeah, all these things can be turned off, but the game likes to forget settings. Like, I never ever want mic volume. Not only is it unnecessary because I can already hear my own voice, there's a ridiculous delay which makes it impossible to deal with. And every time you start the game up, it forgets that. And when you sign in, you're automatically set to guest, at least on PS4. And with my old legacy instruments, you can't access the dashboard. That can only be done with the ps4 controller. And so every time you do that, it sets everyone back to guest for no reason whatsoever.
So is there anything I do like? Yeah, actually. The best thing about it is that they went back and gave all the old DLC harmonies. That's great. It's great that they did that. Now "Feeling This" by Blink-182 won't feel so strangely hollow. Hopefully we can see it for the rest of the songs.
They also added a new "play a show" mode. You play a song and then vote on the next one based on categories. It's varied enough for random selections, but it also gives the players enough control so that it's not frustrating. This is good.
But that's about it. As I've explained, most of the changes are bad. There are just too many things from Rock Band 3 that aren't in this game. The song selecting screen was cleaner and more helpful. Practice mode. Online play. Fucking note streaks! Yeah the spade challenges were pretty stupid, but at least the scores carry over, and when you have achievements like "5 star every song" and "get 1,000,000 points in a song," it's ridiculous that they must be in quickplay mode. Actively discouraging people for enjoying the best feature in the whole game. Why don't "show" and "career" scores translate to quickplay?
And when they were adding things, why didn't they add some of the cooler things that previous Guitar Hero games implemented, like playing notes while holding sustains?
This might be the most disappointed I've ever been in a game. It's not that bad, because Rock Band is still an inherently fun game to play and maybe get drunk to. But wow. This is way worse than Rock Band 3. Hell, it's worse than Rock Band 2 in some obvious respects. It's just the only way to play it on the newer systems.
At least it's better than Guitar Hero Live.
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