Episodes
Wednesday Nov 04, 2015
TNIAB Reviews - Rock Band 4
Wednesday Nov 04, 2015
Wednesday Nov 04, 2015
Rock Band 4 Review (PS4) ((Patch 1.01))
If you’re reading this, chances are you own or have owned plastic instruments at one point or another during your gaming life. Rock Band took the experience of playing in a band and brought home with great success. Now in their fourth iteration, Harmonix has tried to bring Rock Band to the current generation of consoles with all your previous DLC (Downloadable Content) carried over. But what sounds like an automatic home run is bogged down by problems that keep Rock Band 4 from being the euphoric music experience it should be.
The core of the Rock Band experience is playing your plastic instruments along with your friends, and Rock Band 4’s instruments feel really well put together. The new Fender guitar is solid and the buttons give nice feedback, while the new wireless drums can be wacked and slammed hard but not wake your neighbours due to the padding on the drum heads. And the microphone…. Well it’s a microphone and it does its job, what did you expect.
But for me personally I had some particular problems with the drums that were bad enough to have to send them back to MadCatz for a replacement. I had issues with the red pad not reading fast hits, and the bass pedal sometimes activating the blue pad randomly. And these issues wouldn’t go away even after I upgraded my instruments to the latest firmware, which was a surprise that these instruments had firmware at all. All the latest firmware for the instruments appear on the MadCatz website which you will have to manually download and run after pairing your instruments with a PC. I would say this could be a “your mileage may vary” situation but from reading online forums it seems people are having similar issues. But fortunately the replacement set works and is a big upgrade over my old Rock Band 1 drum kit, which you can still use by the way! On the Playstation 4 all you have to do is plug in your old instruments and they just work, which is fantastic if you already have them. On the Xbox One though you will have to buy an adapter to use your old instruments.
I also ran into some problems with calibrating the game to my television which never happened in the previous game. When setting up the calibration with the drums, I get perfect calibration for the drums. But the calibration will be off for the guitar. Then, when I use the auto calibration on the guitar controller, I get perfect calibration for the guitar but the drums are then a bit out of sync. This forced me to manually set the calibration by picking some numbers, testing them out on an easy song, and then going back to calibration and tweaking the settings. It’s just as tedious as the process sounds.
Great news though! You can use all of your DLC from the previous Rock Band games on your new consoles. That is assuming you can find them. The PSN store as of this writing has over 1900 piece of DLC for Rock Band, all of which you will have to manually go through to download old songs you own. I wasn’t even able to sort the store list by price to have the things I own and that which show for free appear at the top. It’s in agonizing process for people who own a lot of a little bit of DLC, because either way you’re digging through all this content to download a whole bunch of stuff or to find the two songs you downloaded back when you were really into Freezepop.
New features like Freestyle Singing and Guitar Solos are fun additions for about 3 songs in total. Being able to make your own lyrics and solos sound great on paper but fail in execution. This opinion can also vary based on the people you’re playing with though. But eventually when you’ve heard the 16th fart joke while someone is singing “That Smell” by Lynyrd Skynyrd or the 12th Dragonforce esq solo while playing “Clint Eastwood” by Gorillaz, you learn to turn those features off. Drums on the other hand have gotten the ability to turn those old freestyle drum fills off in favour of pre-rehearsed fills made by people at Harmonix or static fills, where you keep playing the song track and then hit the green pad at the end of a fill area. The freestyle solos remind you that you’re not an actual rock star and it takes you out of the experience when you come to the realization that you won’t make a better guitar solo than the one that’s already in Panama.
But Rock Band 4 also bring a new way to play in a multiplayer session, by playing actual “shows”. In the “Play a Show” mode you pick an initial song, when it ends you’re not kicked out to the song list but instead each member will vote or a randomly selected song, style, or year of music. It’s a smart way to keep players in the game rather than staring at your potentially huge list of songs and arguing over what’s next.
And even though the new “Play a Show” mode is fantastic a lot of other modes have either been given the axe or heavily neutered. There are still online leaderboards for you to compare your scores with your friends, or against the world, but there are zero competitive or cooperative online options for Rock Band 4. There’s also no practice mode, so you can, well, practice harder songs, or even harder parts of songs. Instead you have to play it for real, fail 2 minutes into a song, and then start over. Plus there’s the character creator which is very shallow in comparison to Rock Band 3, not offering much in the way of customization for clothing or character faces.
It’s very
disappointing that for every positive aspect of Rock Band 4, there’s a problem or minor issue just around the
corner. The game brings the basics of what you need to play Rock Band, but with
a myriad of options either shallow or just straight missing, it holds Rock Band 4 from being what its
predecessors were. If you’re a Rock Band fiend that just want to play the game
on your new consoles, the game gives you the ability to play more Rock Band. But
with the DLC issues and minimal amount of options it’s hard to recommend this
game to anyone else.
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