It’s been almost three years since Harmonix launched their revolutionary music video game series Rock Band to praise and hype from around the world. Despite the sharp decrease in popularity of the music genre as of late, Rock Band is still a series that manages to bring more and more people with every release and Rock Band 3 is no exception. Going back to revolutionizing the genre like they did back in late 2007, Harmonix is adding the keyboard instrument and pro versions of all instruments to this fairly young, but quickly aging series. Unfortunately, Harmonix was only able to provide us with a stand-alone copy of Rock Band 3, so our review will be a little different. This review will be through the perspective of someone who already invested enough into the plastic instrument genre, and want to know what advances Rock Band 3 will be able to bring them.
To be clear, Rock Band 3 isn’t completely revolutionary. Before you start panicking, I can tell you that the same gameplay you know and love from the original Rock Band is there. Guitarists push coloured buttons and strum, drummers hit coloured pads, and a singers sing at the correct pitch and length, all to music of various artists. The revolution comes from the added keyboards and pro-versions of the instruments, but as I mentioned in the intro, we won’t be getting into those.
The overall game of Rock Band has been overhauled with the third entry. Once you start up the game, you are asked right away to create a band. This is done to make everything the player does in the game relate to his/her career. Every song you play, point you earn, and goal you unlock counts towards your career and it is such a great turn for the series. Instead of having to make different bands and choose different players for every mode in the game, you stay with one customizable character and band. This makes everything incredibly streamlined and easy to follow.
Another overhaul is how the career mode works. Instead of only playing set-list after set-list to completion, the career now revolves around completing goals. Each goal can feature everything from connecting online with the game to completing a specific set-list. This works great as it brings in more variety for the career, but does have one big downfall. For players like me who aren’t connected online with their consoles, you will not be able to complete the first goal of the game. With each goal having various things to do, if you can’t complete one, you don’t get the goal completion. Harmonix softens the blow a bit by making the amount of goals fairly small, with each goal specific to an instrument. The only exception to this is the first goal which revolves around setting up the game. Taking the gameplay of music rhythm games to a whole new level by removing the monotony of restrictive set-list playing and breathing some new life with interesting takes is something Harmonix may never be able to top.
If you thought Harmonix’s near perfection of Rock Band’s gameplay was surprising enough, you’ve got another thing coming. The fantastic graphics of the Rock Band series have been nearly perfected, as I don’t see them getting any better. When you look at the character models in comparison to those in Rock Band’s main competitor Guitar Hero, you realize how superior Rock Band is in yet another way. Along with the fantastic character models is the beautiful effects Harmonix puts over the performances for certain songs. For example, while performing a nice, slow ballad, the performance will sometimes slow down or go completely psychedelic. While I appreciate the nice effects, they do come at a bit of a cost. When the performance slows down and the note chart stays at it’s regular speed, a bit of a destruction is made. It becomes hard to focus on the notes and I personally felt a bit nausea having my eyes darting back and fourth between slow and fast. Despite this, Rock Band’s graphics, especially the character models, are the best yet when it comes to music games.
Harmonix matches the fantastic graphics with awesome audio and a great setlist. The audio quality of each and every song is at a high level, and it never drops once. When it comes to the setlist, there is a song for pretty much everyone. The list is full of hits, and covers everything from the ’60s to the ’00s. If For some reason none of the songs on the disc appeal to you, Harmonix is celebrating the release of the 2000th song on the Rock Band network. With literally thousands of songs, there is no excuse for not liking at least one song available for Rock Band 3. Also as a cool added bonus, Harmonix has thrown a little paper manual in all retail copies of Rock Band 3 that lists the 2000 songs on the Rock Band Network.
When it comes down to it, Rock Band 3 has set the bar for music games. As it stands, nothing is better. Even from the perspective of someone who hasn’t played with the new keyboard or pro instruments, the great improvements of pretty much everything prove how great this game is. If you are going to purchase one plastic instrument, rock focused music game this holiday season, Rock Band 3 should be it
PROS
- Gameplay is still great
- Fantastic graphics
- Outstanding audio
- Soundtrack will appeal to everyone
- Despite new instruments, the game is still great for those with original instruments
CONS
- Some visual effects are hard to see and cause confusion
- Some goals impossible to complete without being online
