Rock Band 2 Review
Played on:
Xbox 360
It's time to get out your cheap plastic instruments again, folks, and tear up the charts with some great new songs with Harmonix' Rock Band 2. Of course, many people playing the first never stopped due to the weekly additions of new tracks, but with the release of the sequel, we're getting a huge infusion of songs to play and some great new features that will make playing the game either alone or in a group easier than ever. The focus is even more on the music than before, so get three of your buddies and set aside a few days to take on the latest tracks.
Rock Band 2 doesn't change the formula - it just tweaks it. The first game showed us a vision of the "right" way to play a music game, where four people got together to all play cooperatively, and RB2 tries to perfect the formula while giving us a great selection of new tracks. It's easier to play alone, it's easier to play with friends, and it's also easier to compete against others as a band. Mix in a slick new visual style, the same on-screen antics by the band members and plenty more convenience in the way of setting up controllers and band members and simply playing the game, and I think you'll find that your original Rock Band disc will have become completely obsolete.
That's also due in part to the patch for the original game that allows you to export the original Rock Band tracks to your hard drive for play in Rock Band 2 - the charge is a one-time fee of $5 for re-licensing those tracks, and it's well worth it to be able to take those original tracks and mix them in with your downloaded music (all of which works in Rock Band 2, including the stuff sold under the first game many months ago) and the new stuff that is offered in this release. All told, the Rock Band series, according to Harmonix, will have 500 songs available to play by the end of this year, and all will be playable in RB2.
And that's really where Harmonix has differentiated themselves from Activision and their upcoming Guitar Hero: World Tour. Sure, the new GH has some cool instruments and also reproduces a whole band playing with guitar, bass, drums, and mic, and hell, they even have real musicians like Ozzy Osbourne and Billy Corgan represented in-game with motion capture, but put simply, Rock Band 2 is all about playing a huge range of music with your friends. Rock Band 2's music is made up of 100% master tracks, although Harmonix has gone on the record saying that we may still get less-desirable covers in future downloadable tracks.
The new tour mode still has the same basic setup as before, where you'll play single songs or sets of them at various venues around the world - many of them are real-life places - and get as many fans and stars and money as you can to get to better and better arenas. You'll also be able to hire staff, some of which are really just a way to force you to finish a specific challenge before you can move up, but on the way you'll get a choice of managers each with their own perks, a merchandising girl, a sound guy, roadies, a bus, eventually a plane, and more on your way to the hall of fame. Playing in this mode is way more fun than before, as you'll have much more in the way of choice of what songs to play than in Rock Band. You still won't be able to veto that one RB2 song you absolutely loathe (and don't get me wrong, the track selection in this game is just as fun as last time, but everyone will still find at least a half-dozen songs to hate) but you will be able to mix in your tracks from the first game if you exported them as well as any new downloaded songs.
As with the first game, I have found a few tracks to be a surprise in just how fun they are to play. Foo Fighters' "Everlong", Nirvana's "Drain You", and System of a Down's "Chop Suey" are all tracks I expected to be pretty good, but they are just a blast - and our impromptu band which has been revolving in and out of the house since Sunday still hasn't unlocked every track, but the absolute best has to be "Master Exploder" by Tenacious D for just ridiculous fun. Still, even when everyone else has gone home I can keep working on the band's progress, because this time you can play your band in their world tour while solo. You won't be able to compete in the fixed challenges that have been added or compete in the daily Battle of the Band competitions (where your band competes with those on your friends list to get the best score on one of several challenges changed out by Harmonix every few days - and once you top your friends list, you start competing with the rest of the world), but playing alone still winds up being much more fun than just going methodically through a list of songs like the first Rock Band and every Guitar Hero game so far.
That being said, the Battle of the Bands competition is pretty ridiculous if no one on your friends list is playing Rock Band 2 yet. I went and looked up some band challenges and found out quickly that you'll need all 4 people in the band doing very well on Expert difficulty to even remotely compete near the top in the score challenges, and the star challenges - which don't require 4 players - are still crazy. People on there have scores like "18.16 stars" on a 3-song set, presumably by gold-starring the songs on Expert together and then getting even a few points more than that. Essentially, unless you and your buddies are all Expert players and can mow through even the best of songs, then the Battle of the Bands mode is really only useful to compete in with people on your friends list. Sure, the challenge mode will give you more realistic goals, but those aren't changed out constantly like the Battle of the Bands competitions are. At some point, I think these two modes could have somehow been rolled into one so that all players could feel like they're competing and gaining something, while the serious players can do those same challenges on Expert and go for top score at the high end.
And Battle of the Bands still isn't true online play since you're just comparing scores that you achieved locally. The usual online modes with Score Challenge and Tug of War are back, and while they do work fine, I've never considered them to be an important part of Rock Band. What is fun is making up band members with all the goofy new gear so you can make your full band of post-apocalypse road warriors or prissy 80s hair metal pretty boys. This time around, any band member can play any instrument, too, so if you really want you can have "your" character that moves with you as you play. Not that that winds up happening too often in our house, though, since when we trade instruments we don't bother to switch back to the band selection menu to switch characters around.
Visually, Rock Band 2 borrows a lot from the first game - especially with the band up on stage, doing many of the same animations as before. Seeing male singers rock out really hard at inappropriate moments is always fun, and the "camera kick" move is in full effect here, often multiple times in one song. The crowd is made up of low-poly characters that often have the same copy-pasted animations, but at the very least there are a good number of crowd going around in the big venues. The chance to switch out to make a music video or play in the back of an arcade or record shop is also fun and really mixes up the venues you'll play. No matter what you're doing though, the game just oozes style in the menus, clothing, gig locations, and the way your band members are really shown to get into the music.
For the release of RB2 I picked up the new drums which feature pressure-sensitive pads for detecting how loud you're playing during the "fill" sections, use extra padding to dampen the noise from hits, are wireless and battery operated, and include an improved metal-reinforced bass pedal and expansion ports for things like cymbal addons. All that together makes for a much better drum controller, although my issue of getting double-hits incredibly often has only been reduced and not eliminated (and my original Rock Band drum set was one of the first and, allegedly, worst of them all).
I do want to take this chance to yell at Harmonix and distributor EA for jumping the gun on the Xbox 360 release of the game; in their haste to get an "exclusive premiere" on the 360 a month before it's out on other platforms, they left the full bundles behind. The drums are $90 and the new wireless guitar which is functionally the same as the original (but it now auto-calibrates for lag and the fret buttons aren't so loud to press) is $80. The new mic will be pretty much the same as before. For those who want to wait for the full game bundle which packages a mic, drums, and a guitar together with the game for $190 on the 360, you'll have to wait until October 19th. Otherwise, to get a drum set, guitar, and the game separately right now, you'll be shelling out $230 for it all and that doesn't even include a mic. This is really disappointing and an unfair price to pay for the controller-buying early adopters or those who want to get into Rock Band for the first time with the second game.
Controller availability and price issues aside, Rock Band 2 is an excellent refining of Harmonix' great formula. The best new feature is the combination of little things to make it easier to just jump in and play, both alone or together, offline or online. As long as there are some bands you can compete with on your friends list, then you'll find the online-enabled Battle of the Bands challenges to be great, too, and of course the music selection is great. It's a little frustrating to see over a dozen tracks will be the same between Rock Band 2's 80+ tracks and Guitar Hero World Tour's similar number, and I really wonder just how much music these publishers have access to when there's that much overlap, but at least half of them are pretty good songs. Either way, Rock Band 2 is the best music game on the market right now, and while it may or may not lose that title when Activision's offering is released next month, for now I don't care. It's time to try "Everlong" on Hard difficulty again.
