Rock Band 2

"Improving on a Revolution"

If you enjoyed Rock Band 1, you're in for a surprise when you swap out for Rock Band 2. The songs, menus, characters, outfits, venues, challenges, online, and tour have all been revamped and redone for a whole new experience. Along with a songlist spanning over 120 master tracks (after exporting from Rock Band 1) and over 200 songs available to download from XBox LIVE, this game has any imaginary rock star shredding, banging, and screaming until the wee hours of the morning.

To start with, Rock Band 2 offers a complete compatibility with Rock Band 1 downloadables and 55 tracks directly from the original game. If you loaded up the game right after export, you've already earned yourself 70 songs to start with (plus your DLC). The songlist spans from Emo to Metal to Glam to Bluegrass and right out in Nu-Metal. There's always a song someone will enjoy and always room to expand your music collection and knowledge.

The menu system has been revamped and reorganized to set up three distinct areas you and your fellow bandmates (or just yourself) can get into so you can start rocking. Quickplay, a great zone for picking your songs and doing what you want. Tour, the mainstay of the Rock Band game, and Practice, where you can work on fine tuning your solos or learn how to play. A new addition to the tutorial is the Drum Trainer, for those who never picked up a pair of sticks and banged away at plastic drums, or even the real ones. This is also a great place for returning drummers and pros to pick up new rhythms for your own drum set.

The quickplay section has been definitely made much more for the Rock Band party goers. All you have to do is load up the Band Quickplay, use any of the 10 pre-fabbed characters, and start up a playlist. Oh yeah, did I mention? You can create an endless playlist of whatever songs you want to play. Want to play 30 of the songs from Rock Band 1? How about just a playlist of Metallica? Maybe you'd prefer all those songs you downloaded for Nu-Metal? Anything you can think of, you can make a playlist for with a couple of button pressing. The sorting has made it easier to track down specific songs and categories of songs. You can sort by Genre, Band Name, Song Name, Decade, and Location of the song (RB1/2 or DLC). Under each sorting you can skip to a specific part of that section (Skip to a certain letter, date, or location) so you don't have to scroll from A-T just to find a song by Vagiant. Once you've all agreed on a setlist, you're ready to rock out.

The Tour Mode has been completely fixed and redone so it works more fluidly and offers greater playability. First thing changed will be apparent: you can now choose to rock with your neighbors and family, or with anyone in the world! If you don't have any friends (or any that aren't good enough to be in your band) you can choose the XBox LIVE World Tour and pick up bandmates looking to join a band. If you're just starting a band, creating a character has been made faster and easier, with less ways to accidentally delete the character. The same options have been given to creating them, like the style, the body type, and hair, but there have been more options to choose from when it came to the face and hairstyle, instead of the same four faces and 10 hairstyles. Once your band and characters have been created, you'll find even more options of play in the Practice Space. Not only can you go on your standard World Tour, you can also choose to go into a Battle of the Bands or play Tour Challenges.

World Tour has not changed tremendously, but it has become more complex and longer. Some minor tweaks involve the addition of more cities and venues (4 new cities, 8 new venues) and a change with more Gig Chances (making a music video, confusing your guitarist, and inviting the DW Crew for a show, just to name a few) to score more money and fans. Biggest changes have been the addition of making World Tour universal between Solo and Group play. One band will perform, regardless of who is in it. Which means the removal of the forced "Band Leader" option, and freeing up characters to play whatever instrument they so choose. This is great for people who can't get their friends over enough to play, now you can tour alone if you so choose, and add members later. With the new option to go solo in World Tour, several small features were added that some will notice. Once the band has completed a song or setlist, instead of a checkmark next to the song, a letter and strikes will appear, to show who and what difficulty was played on that song. The highest score will be placed along with what was played and which difficulty it was played at. This makes it a lot easier to sort through what needs improvement and what has been bested.

Battle of the Bands is a new feature that was greatly anticipated, but was somewhat of a letdown when it was revealed. When the band chooses to do Battle of the Bands, several pre-made setlists will be shown that are currently running (all created by Harmonix, and all will end at set dates and times). Your band can choose a setlist, view the songs and see scores that bands have posted. Many setlists have special rules involved, like solo players only, requiring a certain instrument, or playing the longest streak. If a band does not have all the songs on the setlist, that band will not be eligible for that battle until they have gotten all the songs. The part that was a letdown was a two parter: not only did it not involve battling at real time (one band versus another), but once you started playing a battle, the only score you could see was the one directly above you, and the never changed. If this was the first time your band was playing this setlist, you saw the lowest score, which was usually Harmonix-created band "Can't Beat this Score", or a band the did incredibly bad at the set. The upside to this section was if your XBox LIVE friends had a band and they had already posted a score, that was the band you saw instead of the lowest scoring band. Usually this gave you more will to try harder at the set.

Tour Challenges was the second new option for the game, and gave the game even more playability for solo players. The option sets up a tier of challenges, ranking from Apprentice level songs, and ranging all the way up to Challenging and ending at Impossible. When you completed a certain amount of challenges (a custom or pre-fabbed setlist ranging from 4 to 12 songs), you opened up the next tier to more challenging songs. There are three types of challenges, 2 of which offer great playability, and the third option gives downloaders a ton of bonus challenges. The first most notice is the Instrument-Specific Challenges. These challenges are designed specifically to test that instrument at that difficulty. If you completed it, the next difficulty up would unlock. These instrument specific challenges require that that instrument be present in the band (duh), while the second type of challenges can be played by any instrument, but focus more on specific types of songs. These challenges were called "Marathons" and usually involved a large amount of songs played consecutively. This was smart, but sometimes tedious, as many of the marathons were 8 songs and it gets a bit boring when you play 8 songs at the easiest difficulty for the expert players. Eventually, you start opening up what I call the "Smart" Challenges. These challenges are designed for anything other than to put together ALL of your songs into specific categories (yes, I said ALL). If you have all three songs by Bang Camero, be prepared for a Bang Camero playlist, or maybe you happen to have 20 songs in the Rock genre, if you can take it, it'll be there. These "Smart" Challenges are great for an extended play time and sometimes change up your playing habits.

The last thing I'll go over is the actual performance of the game. During a performance, returning players will notice a great change in the actual show on stage. Depending on your performance (sans the drummer, since most of his are solo movements) and style of performers, each one will do different movements and react differently. If all the frontmen (Bass/Guitar/Singer) are something other than Goth and Metal, expect them to get in the cameras face. Sometimes the Guitarist/Bassist will sing with the Singer (if the song has any backup singers during the track, which makes for an even more real performance), and seldom the Guitarist/Bassist will play near each other and react with each other. The singer has all the same moves they typically make, but now the cameras have come into play, and the singer will react a lot more to it (ie getting in it's lens, kicking it, and ramming the stand into it). Oftentimes they will do a stage dive, which now involves segments where there is no singer present in the actual song, and typically won't reappear directly after attempting, as noticed in the previous installment. The drummer has his share of movements with the camera, and now plays much more realistically than previous. My only bad comment on the performance goes to the Guitarist and Bassist, for some awkward reason, the graphics get a bit of a hiccup and fail a bit. Some problems I've noticed: the strings "disappear" into the fretboard (during long notes), the guitar/bass tends to "float" from the player (resulting in hands and limbs sitting in the body/neck of the instrument), and the occasional finger "slips" (the fingers actually pass the strings they mean to hit, resulting in a string bend on say string 4, but the fingers are resting at string 1). Other than these flaws, the performance has been given a much realer feeling to it.

*sigh*

Now, to sum up this massive review of the game:

Performances: 9/10
Graphics: 10/10
Music: 10/10
Playability: 9/10
LIVE Features: 9/10
Overall: 9/10

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 10/01/08

Game Release: Rock Band 2 (US, 09/14/08)