It’s time to hit the stage once more with a living room full of plastic instruments. While there was The Beatles: Rock Band last year, the team at Harmonix and EA Games didn’t come forward with a true sequel of sorts. This year is different, because we’re getting offered Rock Band 3 on all the major consoles. Today, we’ll be looking at the experience on the Xbox 360.
Is it just a glorified track pack with nothing new to offer to the franchise or is Rock Band 3 an entirely different beast altogether this time around? Realistically, it’s neither. It’s more of an evolution of what we’ve already seen, growing in leaps and bounds like when the first fish decided to slide its way onto land.
What’s New with Rock Band 3?
If you were following our coverage of E3 2010 earlier this year, then you may already be familiar with some of the upgrades that accompany Rock Band 3.
The most notable change is the introduction of “pro” instruments. On the guitar, for instance, you can opt for the Fender Mustang Pro guitar with its 17 frets and six strings for a total of 102 fret buttons. The drums toss in up to three cymbal attachments, plus a second bass pedal. For the vocals, you get the three-point harmony introduced with The Beatles and then there’s the brand new “keys” instrument, which can be played as either a keyboard or as a “keytar” slung over your shoulder.
Other niceties include a revamped career mode, a song filtering system, a persistent “overshell” player-specific menu, and a total of over 80 new songs on the disc itself. There’s a lot to like here.
Over 80 Tracks on Disc, Many More as DLC
As before, the Harmonix team have come up with a rather eclectic assortment of tracks for you in Rock Band 3. You’ve got everything from the Beach Boys to Amy Winehouse, Ozzy’s Crazy Train to Paramore’s Misery Business. It’s a crazy set list and there really is a little something for everyone.
Your tastes may differ from mine, but I had a fun time playing Metric’s Combat Baby one moment and then switching it up to Marilyn Manson’s The Beautiful People the next. And let’s not forget about the ability to import songs from older Rock Band games, plus the nearly 2000 more available as downloadable content.
With that many songs, Harmonix realized that a simple “sorting” system wasn’t enough. That’s why I think it’s great that they introduced “filtering” instead. You can define your library based on a number of criteria, including genre, song location, decade, difficulty, and family friendliness, mixing and matching to sort through that massive list of songs. I kid you not when I say this is a true blessing that was since overdue.
Say Hello to the Overshell
Remember how Guitar Hero 5 gave us party play with drop-in and drop-out functionality? Well, take that concept and crank it up to 11 for the “overshell” menu in Rock Band 3.
Instead of only existing within a “Party Play” mode, Overshell is a player-specific menu that can be accessed at any time, in any mode, on any screen. You can choose your on-screen character on the fly, switch difficulty part way through the song, and drop out if you need to feed the dog. No fail mode can be accessed this way too.
Another minor improvement? When you come back from pausing the game, the song rewinds a couple seconds so that you can re-orient yourself. We’ve all been in the situation where we’re on a killer streak, only to have it ruined by a game pause.
Rocking Out with Pro Mode Instruments
Tired of melting faces with your expert drums and expert guitar playing ability? From the truly hardcore, Harmonix has brought Pro Mode to the game and it’s a monumental step up in difficulty.
Moving from just five keys to two full octaves on the keyboard is challenging, but it’s a natural progression. The breaking down of the keys into colored columns helps too. Vocals, like in The Beatles: Rock Band jump to multi-part harmonies, and the drums add in three cymbals and a second bass pedal. The cymbals are cleverly distinguished from the toms based on the shape of the gem; toms are the usual flat bars and cymbals are round orbs. The guitar stream, however, was much more difficult. This isn’t just because of the addition of so many frets and true six-string gameplay, but also by how the notes are displayed. You have to quickly read the numbers as they come down, as they represent the fret number. And yes, there are chords too, so you really have to pay attention to the numbers, the strings, and — if you’d like — the chord names as they come down the note highway. This is hard (but so is playing a guitar for real).
A Totally Revised Career
The concept of the “world tour” career is sort of there, but the career mode is a completely different beast this time around. You don’t play a series of set playlists in different venues like how you did in Rock Band 2; it’s much more persistent and expansive than that.
Instead, the career is set up as a series of goals that span every game mode. Achieving these “goals” earns you fans and unlocks more gear for your custom characters. Some goals are simple, like playing 12 downloaded songs. Other goals are harder, like hitting 100% on an expert solo some place. There are also Road Challenges, which are comprised of smaller set lists, each of which come with additional side objectives. These side objectives earn you “spades”, which work toward the overall goals of the Road Challenges. For instance, you may want to activate Overdrive a minimum number of times to earn the extra “spades.” This is similar to the bonus stars in Guitar Hero 5. All in all, completely everything there is to do on the expanded career mode will take you much longer than before, but the goal-oriented approach rewards you along the way and you can take the career in bite-sized chunks.
Character Creation Still Needs Work
I’d say that the visuals are marginally improved over previous iterations in the Rock Band franchise and your on-screen rockers seem to have a little more personality, but the create a character utility still leaves something to be desired. It looks like there are lots of options to adjust jaw size and pick the right set of eyebrows, but I just couldn’t achieve the looks that I was trying to achieve. My band, for example, is modeled after the Uncanny X-Men and I could make my Charles Xavier look old. I couldn’t make Wolverine (Logan) look grizzled enough. I suppose these are minor quibbles, since the focus is on the gameplay, but it’s still a little annoying. It’s also too bad that I can’t play as my Xbox Avatar like I did in Rock Band 2. I actually liked that.
Closing Thoughts
I can say, without reservation, that Rock Band 3 is the best Rock Band game to date. Harmonix was very ambitious with its approach, adding in much needed upgrades like Overshell and song filtering, but also with the incredible complex Pro instruments. I’m nowhere near the level to attempt pro guitar yet, but I can have a fair bit of fun with pro vocals (three-point harmony) and pro drums.
The overshell is fantastic, the gameplay is as great as it’s ever been, and the song list is growing exponentially by the day. You and your family will love it, after playing it you may even want to get beginner guitar lessons for your kids.
Harmonix has outdone themselves, completely burying the Warriors of Rock offering from that other guy. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some faces to melt.
Pros
- Overshell menu system is fantastic
- Song filtering makes track sorting much easier
- Pro mode adds a whole new dimension
- A varied playlist for all musical tastes
Cons
- Character creation doesn’t really work
- Note highway for pro guitar/bass is confusing
- Career mode may be too non-linear
Overall Rating: 9.0 / 10.0
