Approaching Rock Band 2 is an interesting proposition from a review standpoint. Do you do it as an individual game or as the music platform that Harmonix has touted it to be? Regarding the former, Rock Band 2 doesn’t really push anything forward as far as innovation goes, but as for the latter it does just enough to so resulting in a solid, fun upgrade.
The core mechanics of Rock Band 2 have remained largely unchanged since the first one in the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mold. Players still assume control of guitar, bass, vocals, or drums and play through the game’s “levels”, comprised of note charts on varying degrees of difficulty. There have been a couple of tweaks (there are HO/PO’s for chords now on guitar) to fine tune things, but for all intents and purposes everything plays exactly as it did before.
That said, the game is definitely more balanced for all of its sections thanks to its soundtrack. Consisting of 80 plus songs from the last five decades, there’s a good mix of challenging charts for all sections involved with something for everybody. It’s also much easier to access these songs now thanks to the array of sorting options in the menus, along with being able to create your own playlists there as well.
If you’ve got the first game, you can also move most of the songs over for 400 Microsoft Points and wind up with over 120 songs from the moment you turn on the game.
The biggest of the changes for Rock Band 2 come in the Band World Tour mode. Single players can now take on the BWT with their created characters, who can then have stand-in members to play the other instruments. They can also take that character and play any section now, as opposed to last year where they were stuck to their initial instruments. The mode is also connected to Xbox Live and can be played with anyone on your friends list, so if you’ve got a buddy or buddies they can do a “guest spot” and help you out with a few songs or even the full tour.
Solo Challenges have replaced the separate mode, and consist of various setlists of songs for individual sections. Unlike last year, they also feature DLC since it’s now tied to the BWT. The Battle of the Bands mode is also available and lets you take on competing bands around the world in a number of challenges that are updated consistently. To this point, it’s strictly competition with no prizes or glory to be had (other than your own, of course), so for now it serves as a good way to kill time when you don’t want to play in the main modes.
Rock Band 2 really feels more like an expansion pack than a full on sequel, but in this case it’s not really a bad thing. While it’s not technically a platform in the true sense of the word (you have to buy the game to get the on-disc songs for both), this is the closest a console game is ever going to get and it’s still a ton of fun to play in the process.
Tags: dlc, harmonix, ps3 walk throughs, rock band 2, rockband downloads, rockband drums, wii locate, xbox 360 top games
