Parent's Guide: Rocksmith - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

Rocksmith is a game which lets you play along to a series of rock songs on a real electric guitar - with the bonus of teaching you to play at the same time. With no requirement for expensive peripherals, all you have to do is simply plug in any electric guitar, choose a song and play the notes as they scroll down the screen towards you, with each note represented by coloured icons (with each colour relating to a different string). Luckily, it's easier to pick up than it sounds, with the game even adapting to how well you're playing, starting you off playing a stripped down version of the song, before eventually building up to the full tablature with chords, slides, hammer ons and more. As the game requires an electric guitar if you don't have one already, it does have a fairly steep entry requirement, but with the game effectively working as its own digital guitar teacher, the investment may be worth it, particularly if your kid's always wanted to play guitar or have been taking guitar lessons for a short time already.

In fact, possibly the best part of Rocksmith is that rather than simply pressing a button to trigger a sound effect, as in most games, in Rocksmith, your child will be playing the actual notes from the song - meaning they'll be able to step away from the game, and play the song for real. It's a great incentive, and a brilliant way of learning to play a song, as rather than trying to play a phrase, botching it up, and slowly but surely putting the pieces together, you actually start off by playing your way through the song for yourself - albeit in drastically simplified form. For those just picking up a guitar for the first time, it's a pretty amazing feeling to hear yourself playing along with a song, and a great incentive to keep playing.

But while the game's adaptive difficulty certainly sounds good on paper, you do find that in the game it jumps around a bit more than you'd like. The first few songs you play in the career mode seem pretty simple, with the game only asking you to play single notes, and not too much moving around the fretboard, but then along comes 'In Bloom' by Nirvana and it all goes to pot, asking you to move around the guitar than you've managed before, before finishing you off with some two-finger chords, which, at that point, you won't have seen before. For some children, this may be a case of too much, too soon, but with practice, it's not an insurmountable challenge - especially with the included minigames, that help you familiarise yourself with the guitar, and teach you where various frets are, how to strum, and, importantly, how to play chords. Once you manage to get past Nirvana, it's back to the previously pedestrian pace for a while - until the Red Hot Chilli Peppers 'Higher Ground' rears it's head anyway.

For young children, the biggest hurdle may well be that a real, full-size electric guitar may be a tad on the large size for them - so a half or three quarter size one is probably better suited, and should work in the exact same way, providing it plugs in with a standard 6.3mm jack plug - and any electric guitar will work with the game, provided it has a 6.3mm jack. The only other real bone of contention for younger players is that the scrolling note tracks may take some getting used to, especially if they haven't played a Guitar Hero or Rockband game before. It can occasionally be a bit tricky to tell where your hands are meant to be going (sadly, the notes don't have the number of the fret displayed as they scroll down the screen), but it's fairly intuitive once you've got used to it.

As is the case with a lot of music games, the questionable aspects of Rocksmith lie in the song lyrics rather than the actual game, as much like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, you spend most of your time looking at a scrolling note chart - there's no guts or gore here in the slightest. What there are though are a series of 50+ songs with a definite 'rock' slant to them, which means you may have some instances of mild bad language and occasional references to sex or drugs. By and large the songs are pretty clean, but there's odd ones such as the song 'Mean Bitch' by Taddy Porter that feature mild words like 'bitch', 'damn' and 'hell'.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Xbox 360