The nuts and bolts of the game are all there. You play guitar, bass, drums, or sing in the same manor with notes or words scrolling across the screen and you are judged based on your performance. If you play drums you will notice that there are no longer any places for drum fills. Instead once you have enough overdrive the green column will glow and you can activate overdrive by hitting the glowing green note when it appears. I welcome this change as it keeps you in the song and doesn't allow you to limp your way through a hard song by not activating the overdrive. You will also notice that before and after the song you can't play around hitting random drum pads. I thin maybe The Beatles had some say in making sure no notes get played that aren't theirs.
What shows that Harmonix has grown are the changes they've made to the guts for this game. Difficulty is no longer an issue when trying to clear story mode. As long as you pass all the songs you can continue through to the end. Songs do not need to be unlocked. No fail mode is activated upon anyone choosing easy difficulty. There is an achievement menu that is accessible from several places in the game which tells you how far along you are toward getting certain ones and what you need to do to get others. Quite frankly, this is the most user friendly Rockband game ever.
As I stated, this game is The Beatles experience. The story mode is executed wonderfully starting you off in Liverpool in '61 playing the groups early hits all the way to the rooftop of the Apple Corp. building in '69 with all the haircuts and wardrobe changes in between. Every song in the game has its own background performance and for every one of the eight chapters the band gets a new look. Once you reach the three Abbey Road, the game really begins to shine as the music becomes more psychedelic so do the performances. For Yellow Submarine and Octopus' Garden, the band becomes submerged under water, Within You Without You has them floating through tie-dyed space, I Wan You (She's So Heavy) has them literally pulsing and vibrating toward the end of the song before the classic cutoff. You can get lost in the backgrounds and forget what notes you're supposed to be hitting sometimes.
Going a steap beyond making some cool backgrounds, you also unlock some cool photos of the band from throughout their career. Each one comes with a caption about what was going on with the particular song it unlocked with or that time in their career. After unlocking a certain amount of photos you get prizes in the form of videos of the band. One is an outtake from their first US tour, another a rehearsal for their 2nd appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. There are six in all and well worth it. Finally after clearing ever chapter in story mode, you unlock a challenge where you play a continuous set of music which will also unlock band photos if you recieve the full amount of stars.
This game is loaded with fun. There are 45 songs on the disk and if you have a 360 connected to the internet you can purchase the exclusive DLC track All You Need Is Love (all proceeds are donated to charity). There is also more DLC on the way in the coming months. I was a little upset at the fact you can't import the songs into Rockband 2 and vice versa, but in retrospect having this be a standalone game makes more sense especially after the Kurt Kobain fiasco that the Guitar Hero people are having. The people at Harmonix say that all future DLC songs will have their own unique backgrounds as well with $2 still being the price which is quite a deal considering what they're giving us. So yes I've bought three Rockband games in three years time, but every single one has been absolutely worth it.
Grade A-
Meta Grade 90
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