Nukezilla Review: Rock Band 3 (Xbox 360)

Rock Band 3 has been out for a few weeks now, and in case you haven’t heard yet, it’s the best music game ever made. Let me tell you why.

Harmonix isn’t a company who exactly exploded onto the scene when they first started making games. I was a huge fan of Frequency and Amplitude on the PlayStation 2, but those titles didn’t have the wide exposure that the company’s later efforts did.

Thankfully, they had the experience from these two games under their belt when they went to work on the original Guitar Hero. Their first venture into the now-inescapable plastic instrument business was a huge hit, despite next to no marketing. Guitar Hero ended up being the game that would single-handedly popularize rhythm games — a genre that had a very small, niche following outside of Japan — in America.

Guitar Hero came and went, as did its critically-lauded sequel, before the team at Harmonix handed the reigns of the series to Activision. Having just given away the most successful thing they had ever created, Harmonix one-upped themselves with the release of Rock Band in the Holiday season of 2007, and then Rock Band 2 a year later. We’ve had to wait two years since the last main installment of the series, but it’s definitely safe to say that the team’s time with Rock Band 3 was well-spent.

Rock Band 2 was a fantastically well-made game to begin with, so Harmonix really needed to shoot for the stars with this one. After the revelation that keyboards would be included in the game (a wishlist item for many series fans), it was announced that Rock Band 3 would allow players to play a real guitar in the game. As in, one with six strings that you can plug into an amplifier and actually play.

Something Bigger, Something Brighter

So now we’ve got a real-enough drum kit (especially if you go with Ion’s Drum Rocker kit, which I use and can heartily recommend), a two-octave keyboard, an actual six-stringed guitar if you choose to go that route (which can also be used as a bass in-game), and three microphones (for harmonization — a la The Beatles: Rock Band and Green Day: Rock Band).

The plastic instruments that I own now outnumber the controllers for all my other consoles combined, which means that when I host Rock Band Nights I can accommodate all six people who show up! It’s completely worth it when we get seven people playing “Bohemian Rhapsody” — so much so that I’m willing to overlook the song’s absence in music games prior to this year.

The song list in every rhythm game to date has been praised by some and criticized by others, and each person’s opinion will depend — naturally — on his or her taste in music. Rock Band 3‘s soundtrack is eclectic to be sure, with an unusually high concentration of 80′s pop hits to take advantage of the keyboard peripheral.

In the case of the Rock Band games, though, I think we’re at the point where on-disc song lists don’t really matter anymore. There are over two thousand songs available for download in the Rock Band Music Store, so anybody can make any song list they’d like. Maybe it would make sense for Harmonix to release a less-expensive version of the game with no songs on it, so people with hundreds of songs already on their Xbox or PS3 can save a few bucks, or those who don’t like the included songs can spend the extra cash on some hand-picked tracks from the Music Store.

I enjoyed most of the songs on the disc, especially when trying them all with the different instruments that are now available. If a certain song is boring on drums, you’ll most likely have a lot more fun with it on guitar or keyboard. Of course, with a few beers in you, vocals are fun for every song.

The Hardest Button to Button

The biggest draw of Rock Band 3 in contrast to its predecessors is the idea of learning how to play a real instrument from a videogame. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet gotten my hands on a guitar that’s compatible with Pro mode (the Squier replica is due to hit shelves in March), but I’ve put myself through the wringer in Pro Keyboard mode.

I’ve always been a pretty fast learner with music games, so I decided that with Rock Band 3 I’d uphold my masochistic tradition of refusing to play anything but the highest difficulty when learning a new instrument (it’s tough, but you learn fast).

I’ve never had a harder time learning any fake instrument than the keyboard in this game. In Pro mode, you are playing a real keyboard (albeit only the right hand parts). This means that those with little to no training in the realm of piano / keyboard playing (me) will have a much harder time learning how to play this than those who have a background in the instrument.

The flip side of that difficulty is the level of accomplishment that comes with a successful rendition of “The Power of Love” by Huey Lewis and the News. After going into practice mode for an hour to learn all the fancy four-note chords in that song, then struggling my way to the end of the song without failing out, the sense of pride I exuded was comparable to the first time I cleared “Bark at the Moon” on the original Guitar Hero.

There’s a Pro mode available for drums now too, but that just maps cymbal hits to the cymbals on your drum kit, if you have them. Nothing as game-changing as the guitar or keyboard Pro modes. Of course, putting the cymbal hits in the right places is certainly welcome.

Break on Through (To the Other Side)

As for the changes to the game itself, they are small enough to prevent alienation of the dedicated fans of the series, but major enough to ensure that the price tag on the game is wholly justified — and not just for the 83 songs on the disc.

First, it is so much easier to sort songs in Rock Band 3. Just hit the back / select button on your controller and a bevy of filters pop up on screen that let you prune down your (potentially) huge library of songs into a more manageable list. During some of the longer challenges in the game, I found myself limiting my available songs to only short ones so I could get through the challenge a bit faster. If you only feel like playing songs that you exported from Green Day: Rock Band just push that button. If you only want to play super-long songs that appeared in Rock Band 3 and have support for the keyboard, plug in those filters and away you go.

The game’s loading screens are much more transitional than they were before, too. Rather than cutting away to a screen with a random fact about the song you’re about to play, your band is on-screen doing random things like walking down the street, setting up for a gig or chatting in the back of a limo.

When I first heard the guys from Harmonix talking up this change as one of the game’s major new features, I was a bit cynical. In practice though, it really helps to dispel the frustration that can sometimes come with high frequencies of load times (as music games are especially prone to).

If you’re having trouble with a song, there’s now an option that lets you learn all the parts of the track you’ll need to be able to pass it, in a practice mode-type environment. This is much, much easier than just going into practice mode and going section by section.

Stop Me if You Think You’ve Heard This One Before

In general, Rock Band 3‘s interface has been tuned up and tweaked here and there, and it’s finally caught up with the competing Guitar Hero franchise with drop-in multiplayer (though the much-adored party play from Activision’s series is nowhere to be found here). Some people have complained about the removal of Rock Band 2‘s head-to-head score attack mode, but I don’t find this to be a significant loss.

I am a bit dismayed at the continuing inability for two people in a band to play the same instrument, though. Whenever a band with a keyboardist wants to play, the group is severely limited in their song selection, since such a small number of songs currently support the keyboard. Normally, the keyboard can take a guitar or bass part if there isn’t a keys part associated with the song, but when there’s already a guitarist and bassist in the band the keyboardist is out of luck, and usually just has to sit that song out. This is the only issue I really have with Rock Band 3, and I hope that Harmonix decide to patch same-instrument play into the game at some point.

The last point I’d like to touch on is the new Career mode — or, rather, the relative lack of one.

Rhythm is the last genre in this medium whose entrants need a compelling story. Despite this fact, many music games have tried to shoehorn in completely over-the-top “Behold the Power Of Rock!” storylines, which usually result in me constantly rolling my eyes in-between songs. I bought this game because I want to mash plastic buttons in time with music. If I wanted a terrible story, I’d play something Rare made after Banjo Tooie. Harmonix apparently agree with me on this point, and have all but removed the completely-unnecessary “Career” mode from Rock Band 3.

There is a “Career” option on the main menu, but it just takes you to a list of challenges that can be completed to gain fans, which propel you to higher levels of rock stardom. There are short cutscenes involving your band as you reach new milestones, but you’re never forced to play tiered sets of songs to reach a conclusive “end of the game.”

“Road Challenges” take the place of the traditional career mode, giving the player the option to take their band on the road for a short tour (I believe the longest one is twenty songs). Completing each of these will help you check off numerous goals in the Career section, and they will earn you lots and lots of fans. Rock Band 3‘s approach to the career system is really well-handled.

For a long time, I didn’t anticipate Rock Band 3 being much more than a face-lift — a shiny new vehicle for the hundreds of songs I’ve downloaded over the past few years. While it is that to a large extent, with the tweaks they’ve made to the game’s engine and interface, along with the revamped career mode and the option to learn how to play a real damned instrument with a videogame, Harmonix have not only improved upon the formerly best-in-class Rock Band 2 — they’ve rendered it completely obsolete.