Rock Band, a platform for music fans and gamers to interact with music like never before. Rock Band allows gamers to perform music from the world’s biggest rock artists with their friends as a virtual band using drum, bass/lead guitar and microphone peripherals, in addition to offering deep online connectivity.
GenreRhythm Games
Platforms xbox360
DEVELOPER Harmonix Music | PUBLISHER Codemasters | RELEASE DATE
Rock Band Reviews xbox360
thunderboltgames.com review
The drumkit is a huge piece of equipment just for one game. Essentially a miniaturized version of… well, a drumkit, it’s probably the best instrument out of the package. Featuring four colored pads and a foot pedal, players must bash out the rhythms scrolling on the screen. Sure, it’s just like the guitar bit- except for the fact that you’re playing with two hands and your foot. Each pad serves as a different drum piece (cymbal, tom, etc), and the foot pedal controls the bass drum. It may sound simple, but actually using the foot pedal along with the rest of the pads at the same time takes a lot of getting used to. Just like how playing a real guitar will have helped players reach that orange button on the guitar controller, experience with percussion will be a bonus for Rock Band owners. Luckily, the game provides interactive tutorials for each instrument, so wannabe Lars Ulrichs will be bashing their way to stardom in no time.
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gamesradar.com review
That leaves guitar, which when played solo in Rock Band, isn’t must different from Guitar Hero – well, other than the fact that it lacks Guitar Hero III’s soul-crushing technical difficulty. You once again match the notes on screen to the buttons on your guitar – this time, a black Fender Stratocaster with built-in effects and five extra buttons high up on the neck, intended for solo pyrotechnics. If you dutifully march through the single-player campaigns, you’ll enjoy the variety of venues, the realistic animations, and the loading screens that illustrate your rise to fame. But playing solo misses the whole point.
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gamesaktuell.de review
No Synopsis Available
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gamechronicles.com review
Thankfully, there are some excellent (and fun) tutorials that cover guitar, drums, and vocals, and they are even hosted by real musicians. These tutorials will teach you basic and advanced lessons and by the time you finish you should be ready to hold your own with most of the songs in Rock Band, at least on Easy mode.
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avclub.com review
Rock Band mostly uses actual master tracks for songs, unlike previous incarnations of Guitar Hero, which relied on sound-alike studio musicians. Currently, the game’s online store sells a limited number of additional tracks and entire albums for download, but that number will only grow. Metallica even plans to debut its new single next year as a playable download.
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gameshark.com review
The vocals are an entirely different beast. For those you’ll see a vocal track horizontally across the screen that shows you both the words for each track and a line that moves up and down the track to indicate the pitch at which you should be singing. It may seem simplistic, but it gets the job done.
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gamepro.com review
There was always a palpable amount of inevitability surrounding Rock Band. Though Konami technically pioneered the concept first with GuitarFreaks and DrumMania’s link-up capability, the arcade-only gameplay and track list filled with unknown bands kept it from ever truly catching on in the U.S.
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dignews.com review
Multiplayer. This is the point to the whole game. Getting friends together to jam is… well, it’s hard to define. For the first few songs, everyone’s getting used to the idea that they’re all contributing to the song. The drummer apologizes for messing up the beat, the singer is frustrated at a missed note – but suddenly, it all starts to mesh. Sure, the beat still gets messed up, and notes still get missed, but the crowd is singing along with you and cheering for you and the fireworks and huge stages are your showcase. This is a game you must play with friends. If you do not have friends, go out and make some specifically for the purpose of playing this game.
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oxmonline.com review
It’s hard to find Harmonix even when you know where to look. The game-development studio is nestled in a nondescript office building in downtown Cambridge, directly between the hallowed halls of MIT and Harvard. It’s an unlikely birthplace for a game that turns every man, woman, and Xbox 360 owner into musical Vikings, but that transformation is at the core of why Harmonix exists.
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gamingtarget.com review
The $170 Rock Band bundle comes with one guitar, a microphone and an easy to put together, relatively compact drum set. Since the Guitar Hero guitar controller works with Rock Band for Xbox 360, most people’s four-piece band should be set. Just allow some time for serious cleanup before assembling band mates; all the instruments are in a box within a box within a box to protect your investment. After all, it’s an expensive investment for a package that has three of four instruments, none of which are wireless.
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planetxbox360.com review
From the day Rock Band was created it was never meant to be experienced by a single person, alone in a big house with a tall glass of red wine (or beer). Even so there is still one hell of a single player career mode, which can also be played through with a group of friends on the other instruments. The basic premise is the same as gamers have seen in the past except this time instead of being one small part of a band you are the band. To be clearer you cannot control all parts of the band, obviously, you are only one person so an instrument needs to be selected, character created, and band named.
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gamernode.com review
Actually, that’s an interesting point: everyone’s a bit experienced at this point. It’s hard to find any avid gamer who hasn’t given Guitar Hero a try by now, on any of its many renditions. On one hand, Rock Band tries to cater to this crowd by offering the traditional hard and expert levels to all of the instruments, however many seasoned Guitar Hero champs (such as myself) have been a bit let down by the overall difficulty for the guitar and bass charts. On the other hand, Rock Band does such a good job at capturing the attention of the non-gamer, you’d think it was developed by Nintendo. My whole family has tried Guitar Hero time and time again, but never really grasped the addiction like I did. But when I sat my mom down on drums, threw my dad on bass, and tossed my sister the microphone, you would’ve thought we were the Brady family. I literally had to tear the hardware away from their fingertips just so I could have my 360 back to play a little Halo.
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destructoid.com review
Whatever the case may be, we can’t all be rock stars. Guitar Hero might have gotten some of you close, but let’s face it — the life of a solo guitarist is lonely, and while you might get respect for your killer chops, there’s truly nothing like performing under hot arena lights in front of a sold out crowd. Not that I’d know, of course, but all of those bootleg VHS tapes I bought in high school were very convincing.
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nzgamer.com review
The microphone is one instrument I tend to stay away from – and with good reason. Failing ‘Say It Ain’t So’ on easy is not something to be proud of. And similar to the cousin of Guitar Hero, SingStar, the microphone takes on a karaoke-esque style performance, with a recommended pitch level to hit, along with an arrow pointing whether you need to drop lower, or muster up some of those higher notes. You can sing lower – or higher – assuming you’ve got the pitch down.
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ign.com review
Continuing the theme of playing together, Overdrive can also be used to save a bandmate. Should your drummer perform poorly and fail out of a song, another player with sufficient energy stored up can go into Overdrive and bring their buddy back from the brink. In fact, if you want to finish a song, someone must save the failed player. The crowd won’t stand for losing the backbeat for too long. They will boo you off stage if the band member isn’t saved. If you know your guitarist has trouble with the solo in Metallica’s "Enter Sandman" you may want to save your Overdrive just in case he needs a rescue.
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worthplaying.com review
Singing with the Rock Band mic is an interesting experience. A singer’s performance is broken into "phrases," and the score and star rating are based on how well each phrase is sung. The game picks up the pitch of your voice, and that’s how you’re rated; you don’t even have to say any words, so long as you hum the right pitch. Your voice will be piped through the band’s outbound speakers, along with the voice of the actual singer. The singer’s Overdrive mode can be initiated at any vocally quiet part of the song by saying something into the mic.
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gamezone.com review
The vocals are handled a bit differently, mirroring Harmonix’s Karaoke Revolution series. The microphone (one is included in the Special Edition bundle) has a pitch register that will pick up on whether or not you’re singing the right notes at the right times.
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gamerstemple.com review
The Rock Band guitar also sports a few new features not found on the Guitar Hero guitar. The first is an extra set of fret buttons near the base of the handle. They’re there to make the guitar easier to use for younger players and for older players who want to really get into their solos. There’s also an effects switch which changes the sound of the guitar. It’s not too easy to switch between the five effects while playing,
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consolemonster.com review
Originality within a video game seems to be getting harder and harder to find. There are so many copy-cats out there who think that taking a great idea and doing the same thing will make them successful. We’ve even had our fair share of copy cats here at ConsoleMonster, with various other sites taking our name and/or design.
On the surface, Rock Band seems to actually create something a bit more unique. The idea of being able to play in a band, with your controller being shaped like an instrument – whether that be a guitar, drums or microphone – and rocking your way to stardom is quite an original idea. But if you look in a bit more detail, all Rock Band has done is taken the concept of Guitar Hero III, and Sony’s SingStar, expanded the idea to include drums and merged it into one game.
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gamingnexus.com review
Putting the guitar down for a minute, let’s see what else we can dig out of this huge box. Next up we have the drum set, which is definitely the most exciting addition to the collection. Obviously there’s no way for Harmonix to create a drum kit that is as large and involved as a real drum kit. Not only would that be entirely too expensive, but where would you even keep it? So the company has done the next best thing, they’ve created a drum kit that looks a lot like an electric drum, but feels like a real drum set. You even get drumsticks and a foot-peddle to complete the experience.
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gamingxp.com review
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videogamer.com review
This isn’t just a Guitar Hero copy with drums and a microphone added for good measure, but it’s close enough for Guitar Hero fans to jump straight in. On guitar star power has been replaced by Overdrive, you can use a second set of frets during solo sequences and there is an effects pedal on the guitar for changing the sound. Drumming uses the four drum pads and the foot pedal and plays remarkably similarly to the guitar sections, while singing is mixed with the occasional tambourine and the ability to go into Overdrive by shouting during certain parts of the track.
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