[Review] Rock Band 4

[[MC]Ronin[MC]]

Rock Band 4

 

 

Premiere Date: October 6, 2015
Designer: Alli Tresher
Developer: Harmonix Music Systems
Series: Rock Band
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Publishers: Harmonix Music Systems, Mad Catz

 

My wrists quickly got sore after I sat down at a Rock Band drum kit for the first time in five years – but it’s a good, familiar kind of ache. I’d forgotten how physical of an experience the rock-n’-roll simulator can be, and also just how much fun nailing a song like 90's favorite Live's “All Over You” sends coursing through my body. Rock Band 4
 is no-frills relative to its predecessors – it has no online play, no keyboards, and no secondary modes like Practice or Score Duel – but it also makes smart decisions, resulting in the best overall music-game experience yet.
That Old Familiar Feeling
Firing up Rock Band 4 is an experience that’s almost identical to the first three games Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It’s a deceptively simple concept that, through the power of working as a team and some great music, becomes much more fun than tapping four colored buttons on plastic instruments in time with corresponding note gems as they scroll down the screen has any right to be. With Rock Band, it’s often more about the journey of pretending to rock out together than the destination of a high score.
 

 

Developer Harmonix’s decision to pick up where it left off last generation rather than reinvent itself in any significant way, then, gives you the same feeling as a new AC/DC album: familiar, in that it hits all the same notes that made it famous, but also safe and predictable. Innovation is largely replaced by refinement: it’s easier than ever to sign band members in and out of their own profiles, for instance, and it’s mercifully simple to individually change difficulties on the fly when you get stuck on a tough song like Dream Theater’s merciless “Metropolis, Pt. 1: The Miracle and the Sleeper.” The new console hardware brings quick loading times, and everything runs perfectly smooth, so you’re never more than a few moments away from rocking out and never frustrated by a missed beat. Home-theater calibration is easy, too.

Once you’re up and running with a group of friends, Rock Band 4 creates an almost tangible, physical synergy in the room that everyone feeds off of. It’s almost intoxicating when it’s at its peak – for instance, when you’re all playing perfectly in synch, deploying your Overdrive power together at a key moment in a legendary song all of you know by heart in order to octuple your score.
Songs to Sing
Songs, of course, are the backbone of any Rock Band game, and that’s where Rock Band 4 is noticeably weaker out of the box than it should be. A couple of A-list gets like U2 and Van Halen headline what is the series’ weakest overall on-disc setlist, which is otherwise made up of B- and C-list acts such as The Outfield, Eddie Japan, and .38 Special. Meanwhile, the big names that are here often suffer from Rock Band having already featured their biggest hits in the past three games. Rush is back, but the song is the much lesser-known “A Passage to Bangkok.” Foo Fighters are in, albeit “Feast and the Famine” from their latest album. That’s not to say these songs aren’t fun to play – they are! – but they’re the equivalent of deep cuts on what should be a greatest-hits album.
 

 

Where are Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana, AC/DC, and other A-list acts we’ve seen in this series before? Conspicuously absent. As a result of the lack of starpower, my fellow IGN bandmates often passed the microphone around asking each other, “Anybody know this one?” (Oh, and in case you’re wondering, Jimmy Page still hasn’t loosened his iron grip on the rights to Led Zeppelin’s catalog.)

What saves its catalogue is backward compatibility with nearly every DLC song (and physical instrument) released for previous Rock Bands – and if you bought it for a last-generation system, you still own it for use in Rock Band 4 at no extra cost (as long as you’re going from PS3 to PS4 or Xbox 360 to Xbox One). That’s a massive incentive for those who’ve invested in the series on old consoles. Most notably, it also means some players will come into Rock Band 4 with song catalogs that number in the many hundreds.
Take the Tour
Conversely, Rock Band 4’s new career mode, called the Tour, is by far the series’ strongest campaign yet. Touches of humor, such as my cartoony bandmates and I getting lice from our travels in our beat-up tour van and appearing on stage bald at the next gig, mark choices that allow you to add more fans or better unlocks as you wind through the globe-hopping tour. Sometimes you’ll choose your two to six-song setlists outright during the shows within your tour, sometimes you’ll be forced to vote on them as a band (which itself can lead to friendly banter and/or playful arguments), and sometimes you’ll take virtual fan requests or be asked to perform encores. And the sets are plenty varied, featuring selections of songs usually pooled by general difficulty. Unfortunately, the 65 tunes provided on the disc simply don’t provide enough material to prevent significant repetition during your Tour. You really need extra downloadable songs to pad out your setlists.
 

Rock Band 4’s other significant new feature, solos, is a big win and proved po[CENSORED]r with nearly everyone in the IGN office who has laid hands on it so far. Solos use a color-coded language to indicate where and how to play on your guitar during certain sections of songs, but within it you’re afforded full freedom – meaning you can press any notes you want and create your own licks while being rewarded rather than penalized. They’re introduced well, and thanks to a prominent and dedicated menu option, you can always come back to help understand how they work. It turns out there are several layers to them that I became more comfortable with over time. (If you don’t, you can also turn them off completely if you want.) In addition to helping add to your feeling of rocking out, I most appreciate that they finally make good gameplay use of the five smaller high frets near the body of the guitar – a promise the previous Rock Bands never delivered on.
 

Verdict
The track list that comes on the Rock Band 4 disc is a little light on memorable songs, but thanks to admirable backward compatibility with a huge DLC catalog, Rock Band 4 remains every bit the magical cooperative gaming experience the series has always been. Getting a band together in the living room to rock out creates some incredible moments of musical joy. On top of that, a new career mode injects some fun personality and decision-making, while solos let you express yourself mid-song without penalty. Rock Band still fulfills its potential to make me feel like a superstar musician and, like 65-year-old Bruce Springsteen still doing killer three-hour shows , proves that it’s still got “it.”