Justin "j00zt1n"
Wednesday, November 4th 2009

2 Comments »
Critique, Review

As a long-time music game fan, and a short-time Beatles fan, the announcement of The Beatles: Rock Band sent me into fanboy overdrive last year. Harmonix in charge of a Beatles-themed music game? Surely a recipe for success I thought.

Now the game’s been available for a while and I’ve spent a lot of time with it. Is it everything I hoped for it to be? Is it going to change the way people look at artist-specific music games? Are they really charging $100 for those Beatles guitars? The answer to all of those questions is “yes”.

I am the eggman, they are the eggmen. I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob.

First, the music: This can be either a great thing or a horrible thing, depending on whether you’re me or my roommate. I’ve enjoyed The Beatles’ music since I first got into them a few years ago, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a fanatic (like most of the world seems to be). Their music is good, and the more I listen to it and experience it in different forms (remastered albums, the Cirque du Soleil show Love playing in my hometown of Las Vegas, this game) the more I seem to like it. My roommate, however, can’t stand the band and as such rightly hates The Beatles: Rock Band. So, your enjoyment of this title will hinge primarily on your enjoyment of the titular band’s catalog of music. Anyone will agree, however, that they picked a good assortment of tracks to put into this game, spanning the course of The Beatles’ career.

The Beatles: Rock Band puts you in the shoes of the band as they work their way through their relatively short, but bold musical career. With only forty-five songs to plow through, the experience can be run through quite quickly if you dedicate an afternoon to it. There’s actually an achievement called “Day Tripper”, which you can unlock by beating the game less than twenty-four hours after starting it. It’s not as hard as it sounds.

Making up for the lack of musical quantity in this game is a large dose of quality. Harmonix put a lot of love into this project and it shows. The attention to detail in replicating the locations, the instruments and The Beatles themselves is apparent throughout the course of the game. There are a couple very minor gripes I’ve got in this regard, and those are a few sudden audio cuts before songs (Ed Sullivan shouting “The Beatles!” is cut abruptly before the following song starts), and the recycling of fans in different areas. I understand that all those screaming girls are going to look pretty similar anyway, but at least get some Japanese characters in Japan.

Who cares that we all look the same? It’s The Beatles!

Since I’ve been playing music games for about eight years now, I’ve gotten pretty good at them. I’ve torn through the expert career on every Guitar Hero and Rock Band game to be released so far (except Metallica, never got around to it) on each available instrument. That isn’t to say I didn’t have problems along the way. On almost every one of those games I’ve gotten stuck on a couple songs along the way because the developers tried something new, or charted an extremely difficult song to raise the difficulty bar. The Beatles: Rock Band does not follow this trend. The vocal harmonies are a wonderful addition and can be challenging since they’ve not been done in a game before (though I didn’t get a lot of chances to play with them; see Chelsea’s part of this review for more details on that aspect of the game), but overall this is a very easy game.

When I say the game is easy, I mean that in completely relative terms. I’m not claiming that someone who’s never played Rock Band will be able to hop on drums and whiz through the game on expert, but in direct comparison to every other mainstream music game that’s come out in the last few years, this is the simplest. That’s to be expected, knowing that The Beatles were a very technically-simple band. Still, it’s worth noting for those who will undoubtedly want more of a challenge.

The Beatles: Rock Band reflects that simplicity. Despite having no problem beating any of the songs in the game, I had a blast playing through it. Replay value is rather low, because there’s not a lot of incentive to improve scores once you get five stars on everything (again, not hard to do). DLC being released monthly (as opposed to Rock Band 2’s weekly system) doesn’t help.

A few more points worth mentioning:

• No more drum fills! This is supposedly to preserve the authenticity of the band’s music, but it’s very jarring when you thwack a pad and nothing happens. At least let us goof around before the song starts!
• As you play through the game, you’ll notice that songs seem to jump all over the place difficulty-wise. This is because you play through The Beatles’ career chronologically. Because of this, some of the hardest songs you’ll encounter are right at the beginning of the game (depending on which instrument you play). The only ways to avoid this would be either mixing up the timeline of the game, or artificially adding difficulty to songs. In the end, I’m glad they went with the system they did, though it’s still not perfect.
• It’s not Rock Band 3. Activision just upped the ante features-wise with Guitar Hero 5, while the Rock Band franchise isn’t getting another flagship instalment at any point this year. The Beatles: Rock Band can’t really be faulted for this, but this game came at the cost of no new “real” Rock Band until further notice. Harmonix needs to either get to work right away on the new hotness, or hope that their existing software will be enough to keep their fans from drifting to the competition.
• Seriously, a hundred dollars for The Beatles instruments? Don’t these play pretty much like standard Rock Band 2 guitars? I’ll be waiting for the inevitable plastic instrument fire-sale next year to pick one of those up.
• I haven’t been able to play on the fancy little drum kit they released for this game, but from what I understand it’s a new paint job on the existing Rock Band 2 kit. That kit is fine, but a few hardware improvements would have been welcome.

To be completely honest, it was very difficult for me to write a review of this game that focuses mainly on its flaws (and I wasn’t able to avoid gushing about how good it is anyway). The Beatles: Rock Band is hands-down the greatest music game to focus on a single band ever. I read something on Twitter a while back that perfectly sums up the situation. I can’t quote it verbatim because I can’t find it, but it went something along the lines of “If I were Aerosmith, Metallica or Van Halen I’d be pissed right now.”

That sounds about right.

Chelsea “Nintendoll”

My part of the review will be a little shorter, since I will be concentrating primarily on vocal parts of the game. As Justin has already covered my few gripes with this game, I’ll jump right into the newest addition to the Rock Band franchise: the vocal harmonies.

For me, this is the most exciting aspect of the game. So imagine my utter disappointment when I got the game and found out that, unlike previous Rock Band games, you can’t use the Xbox Live headset to sing. This cripples the game somewhat as those who wish to truly sing as a band need to not only purchase three microphones, but also stands to hold them. Without the use of headsets, people playing guitar and bass simply can’t sing and play without extra (expensive) equipment. While playing with my sister (who was playing bass) I had to hold one mic for myself and hold one in front of her face so she could sing the harmonies. Some might point out that you could just get three people to specifically sing with others play instruments. However the only time this is feasible is at a party, where most people will likely be too drunk and/or impatient to arrange that type of setup.

Making beautiful music together.

I understand that it would probably take a lot of work in the programming department to get something that complicated to work properly. After all, in previous Rock Band games the microphone corresponded with one player, one profile, and therefore one controller. It might be difficult to try to get the game to recognize the headset of a separate controller as an input for the singer. However, not including a headset as an input option for the singer’s controller forces the player to get three microphones to enjoy the full experience of the game—which will also require a USB hub unless you happen to have all wireless controllers, instruments, and no wireless adapter.

While the game has made improvements on the vocal tracking system, there is still an odd problem that has carried over from previous Rock Band games. The score meter for vocals will fill up faster if you sing a note a beat before it actually happens. While it is certainly possible to fill the score meter on Expert without singing a second ahead of the music, this little “trick” helps. It’s not a game-breaker, just a little weird quirk of the game. I’m sure that extra second is there so that the game can recognize the note change, but it’s still a bit frustrating to know that it’s easier to get a high score when singing out of sync with the audio.

Aside from my own experiences, I agree with the things Justin mentioned above. There are a few minor annoyances in this game, but overall it is truly a beautiful experience for fans of The Beatles.

You should play this game if…

…you’re interested in The Beatles in any capacity, and are willing to play through an entire game of music by them and nobody else.

Final Score

While you won’t find much challenge here, the few hours this game will take you to play through will be well-spent.

(What does this score mean?)