Five years have passed since the last Rock Band launched, and in that time the rhythm action genre has seen a dip in popularity, leading to piles of unloved plastic peripherals gathering dust across the land... and my lounge. Now Harmonix and Mad Catz are getting the band back together, and far from being a sad greatest hits tour performed by tired old rockers, this is a resounding return to its former glory.
Rock Band, at its heart, takes officially licensed music tracks and breaks them down into guitar, bass, drum and vocal parts. By matching the onscreen prompts you keep your chosen section of the song playing, and by teaming up with friends you can feel like you're actually performing the music together. This core experience is as strong as ever, but additional, unique features have made a real difference to how it feels to play.
The most important change is the addition of Freestyle Guitar Solos, which allow you to create impressive solos on the fly by following a set of simple prompts, so regardless of what difficulty you play on you can easily noodle away like the gifted yet improbable offspring of Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen. It's truly revolutionary and, by experimenting with different combinations of button presses and strumming techniques, I was able to produce a varied performance every time I played a song.
Thankfully, Freestyle Guitar Solos are only included in tracks that already contain a relevant solo section, so you won't be asked to inappropriately shred over the top of Van Morrison's 'Brown Eyed Girl', but songs that feature them are clearly labelled on the selection screen. I’ve been playing rhythm action games since the original Guitar Hero on PS2, and I can honestly say that no other feature over the years has given me as much enjoyment or satisfaction.
When calibrating previous Rock Band games, you needed to strum your guitar in time to various beeps and onscreen prompts to try and synchronise your TV and audio system to the tracks being played, often with varying degrees of success. Thanks to a built in sound and light sensor on the new guitar, however, you can now simply hold it up to your speakers and the screen in a fully automated calibration process, giving much more accurate results in seconds.
This spirit of improvisation and fluidity extends to the drums and vocals too. Dynamic Drum Fills are taken from a large pool of pre-made beats and are a big improvement over the chaotic 'play whatever you like' sections of previous instalments, so that even if you're not an aspiring Keith Moon you can still follow the simplified prompts and sound like you have a world tour under your belt. Singers get their own variation too, with Freestyle Vocals allowing you to sing your own lyrics, as long as they're in the same key as the original track. These additions remove more barriers to entry, making an already accessible series even more approachable.
Choose to Go On Tour and you can create your own band to hit the road with. If you’re struggling for a moniker, then the random band name generator will help you out - after a number of laugh-out-loud suggestions I felt I had to go with 'Fistful of Hemorrhoids'. Once you’ve customised your character and picked the rest of your bandmates from a varied cast of extras (the bearded Barnabus Mudflaps is my favourite), you’re off to take on the world.
Enjoyable RPG-lite elements allow you to make choices to determine the direction your band goes in. Embarking on Cash tours with preset playlists will earn you big bucks to buy new outfits and instruments, but you can also go down the fan-pleasing route and choose your own tracks to increase your fame and unlock exclusive showcases. Being able to shape your band's future gives meaning to the shows you play, rather than just rattling through a bunch of songs for the sake of it.
Play A Show mode features a new voting system to allow bandmates to choose the next songs. However the reality is, disappointingly, the outcome is randomly selected from all votes cast, meaning that a single person's suggestion can still win through and force everyone else to endure an unpopular choice. Sometimes the audience will throw in suggestions, which you can take or leave, and I often found myself unable to exit the stage at the end of a session due to incessant demands for an encore.