Sep
The Beatles: Rock Band Game Review
Written by Scrooby on 10th September, 2009 with 2 Comments
Tags: Guitar Hero 5, Harmonix, Rock Band, The Beatles: Rock Band
When I first heard that Harmonix were creating a new Beatles based Rock Band game, I was slightly unsure as I am not a huge fan of The Beatles. I like some of their classic songs but otherwise I’m not a big fan. Anyway, I decided to buy it simply because it’s a Rock Band game and it’s most likely got some great new features. However, it didn’t have as many as I would have liked.
The biggest thing that stands out in this new game is the amount of time and effort that’s been put into making all the cut-scene movies and the characters. The biggest and most impressive movie of the game has to be the intro movie which is absolutely amazing. The intro was created by Harmonix and the Oscar award winning film and animation company, Passion Pictures.
As for the characters, throughout the entire game you play as The Beatles going through the many years of their characters. As you would expect, they didn’t look the same throughout their career, so why should they in the game? For each section, the age of the players, facial features and hair styles all change to match what they would have done back in the 60′s. Alot of time, thought and effort has gone into making this game.
Although this is extremely good and it makes the game look and feel brilliant and new, it hasn’t really brought anything new from the last Rock Band game, Rock Band 2. There were only a couple of changes that I could see, the first one is that you can now have multiple singers to create the harmony effect that The Beatles create. The second one was that when you pause the game during a song, when you go to resume, it counts down allowing you to prepare and not miss a note. However, this is nothing new because Guitar Hero actually introduced this nice feature in Guitar Hero World Tour if I remember correctly.
The career of the game is split into 8 different sections with between 4 and 7 songs in each section. Overall there are 45 songs in the whole game that’s spread across the entire career of The Beatles, giving a great variety of songs. Once you complete each song, you are rewarded by unlocking a photo from the career of The Beatles. If you get 3 stars in the song, you unlock 1 photo, if you get all 5 stars, you unlock 2 photos, all of which can be viewed from the menu.
After you complete each of the sections, you unlock a new challenge, which are pretty simple really. All you have to do is complete each of the songs from section without a break and if you get 5 stars for each song, you unlock yet another photo.
A big downside of the game is the complexity of the songs. Even when you’re playing them on Expert difficulty, they are still quite simple, and this stands for all of the instruments. Playing through one of the songs on Expert Guitar, there was a total of 196 notes, this is nothing compared to the songs in the standard Rock Band and Guitar Hero games. I wouldn’t want to go through any of the songs on anything but Expert as there would be hardly any notes to hit.
Onto the graphics, not alot can be said about them because not much has changed between this new game and the previous. However, there is a slight improvement because more detail has been put into the characters and the backgrounds of the game, making the overall graphical appearance better.
Summary
Overall, it seems that alot of effort has been put into making this game, however, unless you’re a huge fan of The Beatles, I wouldn’t say it’s a must buy. No doubt it will make alot of money for Harmonix and The Beatles themselves, but I don’t think they will out sell Guitar Hero 5 which has been released about 3 days later, watch out for the review of that by the way.
Good Points = Extremely good cut-scenes, great detail of characters.
Bad Points = Not many new features, only great if you like The Beatles, songs are very simple.
I would give this game a 7/10 however it would be more if I was a big Beatles fan.
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The attention to detail here has me interested already, and of course I love the Beatles. I haven’t bought it yet but I will be soon. As for the complexity of the songs, well that’s fine because I struggle with anything beyond medium difficulty!
It’s so seemless! I never thought they’d achieve the level of finesse that they have. It’s already limited in Game in Sheffield. I wonder how stocks are going to hold up.