Select the game “Rock Band 4″.
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While there’s something to be said for trying something new, many fans will appreciate just how true to the originals Rock Band 4 remains. It’s a great feature to have, one that, unfortunately is not shared across the Xbox One version; one which requires the use of an additional adaptor. Who better than the masters of the genre to bring back one of the most storied franchises of the last decade for another run at greatness?
Above: Rock Band 4 still supports the cymbals that let you play Pro Drums (indicated by the notes that look like Hershey’s Kisses). Rock Band 4 offers a few branching decisions on the Tour, which will distinguish your playthrough from others by focusing on garnering fans or earning cash, rather than getting a consistent balance of the two.
The song catalog in the core Rock Band 4 game is decent, but not particularly robust by comparison to the series’ back catalogue.
Even if you think you’re “all over” Rock Band, this game may prove you wrong. The note highways are still there and kicking, and so is the vocal track high above the rest of the band.
In fact, the most notable part of Rock Band 4 is that the vast majority of your legacy instruments will indeed work with the game so you won’t need to purchase the new instrument bundles, though the instruments themselves have been given a noticeable upgrade. The music may have changed, but venue is still the same. Players use custom plastic drums and guitars and “play” these virtual instruments by matching button presses to a scrolling note chart on-screen. It wasn’t necessarily Harmonix’s fault, either, given that it was the Guitar Hero brand that really spammed store shelves. During a song, players can choose whether to play the standard rock offering or launch into their own unique guitar licks by clicking on the directional pad. It’s just a solo for the whole length of the song. Well, a rather large catch if you have a big Rock Band library. Often if you weren’t up to snuff on guitar, they were more of a chore and burden to the song than they were enjoyable moments to live out in your living room. As much fun as it was to play freestyle on an on-disc track like The Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love”, these solos have been implemented brilliantly into older tracks like The White Stripes’ “Icky Thump”.
For these solo sections, Harmonix has revamped the breakdown, and completely removed individual notes. As long as you still sing on key, you’ll be able to score points.
Speaking of, vocalists also get to jump in on this notion. And just months later, the comeback tour has begun with Rock Band 4. There are a few neat new additions, most of which are based around giving players more creative control over the music they’re playing. The publisher provided GamesBeat with copies of the game as well as guitars, drum kits, and microphones for both platforms for this review. It can support up to four players; a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer, and a singer.
Do people still care about music games? Now there’s Freestyle Vocals, which allows people to improvise a bit. You’ve still got to be able to get the tone and rhythm right, and on Hard and Expert that kind of accuracy is a challenge for the casual karaoke crowd. There’s no good reason to purchase duplicate hardware if you don’t need it, though. You’ve got two body types, “masculine” and “feminine” with no apparent control for height, width, bulk, or anything else.
Creating a band with those friends is as easy as ever, though the creation process is very light early on.
Actual gameplay is split between tour mode, playing a show and quick play. At the start though, your band will be incredibly Spartan.
Repeat step nine for as many Add-Ons as you would like downloaded to your console. After a selection is made, the game will pull up a random song from that category. When you play a show in either Show or Tour mode, your band will be given a list of options to vote on for inclusion on the set list. You’ll be playing a lot of the same songs over and over when you first start out, which is okay, but not the best for a party atmosphere.
Filter the list to see ONLY “Free” Add-Ons. Harmonix has done quite a lot of work to make the 1,700 legacy tracks compatible with the new game’s features, so new purchases will be priced at USD$2 per song.
Rock Band 4 asks you to overcome a bunch of issues in order to have the best possible experience. Whatever band you create also stars in the loading screen segments, which is a nice touch. Even though I created more than one custom character, I was unable to assign them to the other band positions. Arrangement like Rock Band and Guitar Hero were the most sizzling things in the business, acquiring billions of dollars straight up until the sudden point where they weren’t. And that’s not always a good thing.
While there are choices such as picking between selling out and making more money in the short term or going on the road and garnering more long-term fans, they all feel very gamey in the end (“do you want fans or money?”). If you want your DLC downloaded to your console, you will have to re-download tracks individually. Most of these were just falsely labeled in the store (clicking on them would tell me I owned them, and the label would change to purchased), but a few still demanded payment. As soon as the DLC servers went live, I combed through the entire back catalog to see if there were any gems I’d missed. We’re here to deliver just that!
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This also puts the kibosh on exporting on-disc tracks from previous Rock Band games to Rock Band 4 for the time being, but that’s another conversation entirely. None of this affects this review as it’s all theoretical, but it’s good to know.
