It's been a while since we last heard from Rock Band. After gracing our consoles with the immense Rock Band 1 and 2, before moving into band specific games for The Beatles: Rock Band and Green Day Rock Band, adding the family friendly (and crying out for a sequel) LEGO Rock Band to its portfolio along the way, Rock Band took a year or so out, before bursting back onto the scene with the keyboard-inclusive, but slightly disappointing difficult third album, Rock Band 3. After going into hibernation for the past year or so, we were beginning to wonder if Rock Band was about to forever take a backseat to developer Harmonix's other project, Dance Central - but then along came Rock Band Blitz, a downloadable Arcade/PSN game, that takes a slightly different approach to the plastic guitar based series.
In fact, the first thing you need to know about Rock Band Blitz is that it doesn't actually use a guitar at all - or any other of the plastic instruments that have taken up residence over the years in the corner of your room. Instead, the game's played using only your controller - and even then, it only uses a few buttons. Taking the Rock Band concept, and distilling it into a (supposedly) easier to pick up and play form, Rock Band Blitz splits songs up into a maximum of five tracks, one for drums, bass, lead guitar, vocals, and keyboard, much like the games that came before it. But rather than choosing your part, and trying your best to hit every single note, in Rock Band Blitz, you can switch between tracks freely at the press of a button. In order to prevent you having a mental breakdown as you try to hit every note across all five tracks simultaneously, each track only has two notes to play, as opposed to the usual five, which makes switching between tracks a lot easier than it could be. With several control configurations to choose from, you can choose a set up that suits you - on ours, we switch tracks using the analogue stick, and hit the left note using A, and right using B.
Two notes helps make things a lot simpler - although it'll take some time to get used to watching the notes fly past...
Rather than having to worry about keeping each track "going", so to speak, and trying to single-handedly keep an entire band from slipping into the red and failing, in Rock Band Blitz, it's actually impossible to fail a song, seeing as the entire design of the game relies on you missing loads of notes, as you're only physically able to play a single track. Instead, the only goal here is to earn as many points as possible, by splitting your time between tracks as wisely as possible - but how you're actually meant to go about doing that isn't exactly explained all that well in game.
The most obvious way to increase your score is to build up your multiplier. Each track has its own multiplier, and unlike in other games, there's no need to hit notes consecutively if you want to start your multiplier growing - all you really have to do is hit some notes in that track. As you hit notes in the track, and the multiplier increases, the track will start to glow in segments, with a fully coloured in track showing that you've levelled it up as much as is possible. The idea here is to level each of your tracks up evenly, and get them all fully levelled up before you reach a checkpoint gate, as the checkpoints increase your level cap by three above your lowest level - so passing through a checkpoint when your lowest level is level 4 will take your level cap to 7. Encouraging you to switch between tracks as much as possible to level them all up, this is an approach that'll require you to learn each song off by heart if you want the best score, as you learn to make the most of your time in each track - after all, there's no point sitting waiting for the next drum note to come if there are dozens whizzing past on other tracks.
But although the multipliers are a lot more forgiving, that doesn't mean there's no reward for hitting notes consecutively. Build up a decent streak, and you'll activate Blitz mode, a disorienting feature that adjusts the angle you're playing at, and adds in all sorts of crazy blurry effects, basically making it harder to see notes coming. In this mode, you're awarded a points bonus every ten notes you hit - and if you can keep it going, the bonuses keep getting bigger and bigger. Miss a note, of course, and you'll pull your Blitz bar back down - miss two or three, and you'll be sucked back into the real world, to build up a combo and activate Blitz mode again. Two multipliers down, plenty more to go.
Somehow, the person playing this track has gold starred it, despite only having a 5x multiplier. That's pretty impressive.
The next power-ups work in a little bit of a different way to the ones detailed above, as they have to be equipped before you start each song. Split into three categories - Overdrive power-ups, Note power-ups, and Instrument bonuses, these power-ups actually have to be unlocked in order for you to use them - and, in a way not too dissimilar to Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook, cost "Coins" if you want to be able to equip them for a song. Seeing as you earn plenty of coins for finishing each song, though, it's unlikely you'll ever have to forego your favourite power-up because you can't afford it - and, thankfully, extra coins can't be bought using real money.
The first power-up you'll earn is a 2x Overdrive power-up, which works in a similar way to other Rock Band games - by hitting special, white notes on the tracks, you'll fill up your Overdrive bar, which can then be triggered by pressing X, giving you another 2x multiplier on top of your regular ones, leading to some pretty huge scores. The only problem is, it's not really obvious enough when you've earnt enough to use your power-up - it may be front and centre, and represented by quite a large icon, but with so much going on, it can easily get lost in the muddle. Your first Note power-up, meanwhile, is a kind of bomb, which takes the form of a random purple note that shows up in one of the tracks at fairly regular intervals. Hit it, and you'll detonate it, which causes an explosion that clears a number of notes in all surrounding tracks, and scores you points for them all. Meanwhile, the Instrument power-ups are a little bit different. The first one you unlock is called Synchrony, and adds a little set of lines at regular intervals on the track. If you switch track just as you're passing over these lines, you'll earn a point bonus, and automatically take out the first note on the track you've switched to. With plenty more waiting to be unlocked, it's through mixing these various power ups, experimenting with various combinations, and finding a set that works best for you, that lets you get the highest possible scores.
The biggest problem with Rock Band Blitz, though, is that outside of trying for a high score, there's not really all that much to do. There's nothing in the way of a single player mode here, and nothing even beginning to resemble the career mode from earlier games - instead, the only thing that's intended to keep you coming back is the prospect of earning an ever higher score on a song, and beating your friends through 'Score Wars'. The problem is, there's no way to issue a Score War to a friend through the game, (in fact, the only way to take part in a score war with a friend in-game is when the game automatically suggests it on the recommended screen - but more on that later) - instead, you're expected to link your game with your Facebook account, and challenge people through there. If you don't use Facebook, don't have all of your console friends on Facebook, or simply would prefer to be able to challenge people from within the game (as would be perfectly reasonable), you're left sadly wanting here.
Even more frustrating is that the Facebook app, called Rock Band World, actually features regularly updating challenges, which can only be accessed through Facebook. Providing the essential structure and goals that the game's so desperately missing, these goals are suitably varied, asking you to get 3 stars on any alternative song, or 12 stars on any 80s songs, and would give you plenty of reason to come back - if they were actually part of the game. But having them as a separate entity, accessible only from Facebook itself really holds things back. When I'm playing the game, the last thing I want to do is hobble over to my PC and go round the app looking for goals I can attempt. Even when you accept a goal on Facebook, there's nothing that pops up in game to say about it, and nothing to tell you when you've completed it, either. Instead, there's a single tab hidden away in the Messages page that tells you what goals you've accepted - but not what you have to do for them, and not how close you are to completing them. If these were all built into the game, rather than in an external app, it would be so much better. And therein lies the kicker.
All the fireworks, none of the Katy Perry. Sounds good to us.
As there's so little here for anyone playing on their own, and as the entire point of the game is to try and beat your friend's scores, how much fun you get out of Rock Band Blitz will depend entirely on how many friends you have that also own the game. If you only have one or two, then you'll find yourself effectively stuck in isolation, with the only incentive to come back being to beat your own scores. There's still fun to be had of course, as firing off a few songs is a great way to pass some time - but that extra incentive would have gone a long way. It's such a shame, too, because what's here is a lot of fun. It's a lot easier than previous Rock Band games, as all you really have to do is alternate between two buttons, and hitting every note in a solo still feels just as good as it used to. It's just there's so little reason to come back.
It's also a little bit frustrating that, for a game so perfectly suited to bite-sized play, whenever you actually go to play the game, you'll have to sit there for nigh on 30 seconds while the game checks for any songs you may have downloaded since last time. You see, brilliantly, Rock Band Blitz is compatible with every single Rock Band song you've ever downloaded or exported, from the first game through to the present day (excluding the songs from Rock Band 3, as those can't be exported). Depending on how many Rock Band games you've exported the tracks from, and how many songs you've downloaded, you could have over a thousand songs waiting to be played, all of which have been automatically converted to fit the two note format for Blitz - which is certainly a great twist. It's just annoying that it takes so long to actually load the game.
However, having access to the entire back catalogue of Rock Band songs has also made Blitz overly reliant on them. If this is your first Rock Band game, or if you just haven't bought that many songs before, you'll find yourself with a rather limited selection here. Although there's certainly plenty for your money, there's not a wide enough selection here to make it feel like a game in its own right. With 25 tracks on offer (two of which were already included on Rock Band 2), the included selection of songs are heavily geared towards more modern, and therefore potentially less recognisable music. While Living Colour's Cult of Personality is arguably the best song on there, and the Barenaked Ladies One Week is a lot of fun, too, the list starts to get a bit thinner from there - at least in our opinion. With Blink 182, Elton John , Fall Out Boy, Iron Maiden, Tears for Fears and, er, Pink also featuring in the collection, there's at least a bit of variety - but it seems to be lacking the mix, and, at least as far as our tastes go, quality, found in previous soundtracks.
Well, at least it's recommending a decent song.
One other sticking point is that the first screen you see in the game is the Recommended page, which suggests a mixture of songs that you might want to try out, based on what your friends have been playing, what you've been playing ("Beat your score on this"), and, most worryingly, songs now available to download. Whilst flagging up songs that may be of interest to you certainly makes sense from a business perspective, and arguably from a discovery perspective, it's the fact that these songs aren't all that well differentiated that causes the problem - especially if you leave a controller lying around with a child nearby who just clicks through things without reading. Either way, some way of separating the downloadable songs from the actual songs you own would have made the recommended page seem that little bit less deceitful.
Overall, then, Rock Band Blitz is a game that feels somewhat disjointed. As a game, if you don't have a tight group of friends, constantly competing to better each other's scores, then the fun you'll get out of this will be limited, thanks to the decision to restrict the single player objectives to Facebook, and the pushy Recommended screen that ends up making the game feel more like an interactive shop front than a game in its own right. On the other hand, seeing as the songs included in the game can all be played in Rock Band 3, with full, five note tabs, for just over a tenner, you're getting a collection of 25 songs (or 23 songs, if you already own Rock Band 2), which you can blast through in Blitz, before heading over to Rock Band 3 to play in a full band. And that's not something that can be sniffed at.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
