Monday, January 28, 2013

ROCK BAND BLITZ REVIEW: A DIFFERENT FREQUENCY


What do you do when you have a game series in which people are sick and tired of buying peripherals for? If you’re Activision, you could just can the series altogether like they did with Guitar Hero. Or, you could be like Harmonix and look back into your design history and make use of a back catalogue you already have. Rock Band Blitz isn’t an entirely new concept, but it’s a smart and fun way of keeping a brand alive while making a quick buck at the same time.
Blitz does away with the plastic instruments, and goes back to the Frequency and Amplitude days by using a good old controller. If you were ever overwhelmed by those two mentioned efforts, Rock Band Blitz actually simplifies gameplay to just a few buttons. While this would sound like this would strip the game of any depth or strategy, you would be wrong.

On the highway, there are four or five tracks (depending on what the song supports) for each instrument. Notes are deployed by pressing only two buttons, which is the left d-pad button and the A-button (there are other configurations as well). No track ever disappears like in Amplitude after clearing the notes; instead you build up a multiplier for that track until you hit a maximum amount before the checkpoint. The real strategy lies here, since you need to build up every track’s multiplier before hitting a checkpoint, so the point multiplier can increase even higher once you clear that mark.  If even one track never had increased its multiplier, you won’t be able to increase the rest of the instrument’s multiplier bonuses until you do so. So the real key to building up your score is switching from track to track to build up the score multipliers, as well as deciding which special power-ups you select to use before the song begins. Some power-ups are more beneficial than others, and also require an amount of coins to use for the song (you can earn coins by just playing through songs or by opting into challenges through Facebook).

The game’s look is fairly simple, but you’re really just focused on the highway to deploy the notes. Still, I wish there was much more variety to the given backgrounds than just the one environment the game uses. When you buy Blitz, you also get a good number of songs to use (somewhere around 25), which can also be used in Rock Band 3. It makes it seem like you’re buying a track pack and just getting a game for free, but the added value of being able to use these songs in RB3 is a nice bonus. The included songs come from the likes of Kelly Clarkson, P!nk, Elton John and more. It’s more on the pop side than the rest of the RB titles, but I think that’s just to make the game be as accessible as possible. You also have access to all downloadable songs on your hard drive, as well as the songs you have imported from other Rock Band discs. The only downside is you can’t access the RB3 songs, which never gave an option to import.

Rock Band Blitz is the right way to handle a problem within the genre. Harmonix saw the decline of the popularity of playing with plastic instruments, and figured out a sensible solution to keep people buying songs from their music store. While I would have liked to have seen a better way of getting into challenges to earn coins other than going into Facebook to opt-in, and more variety in the background environments during gameplay, Blitz is a very fun and addictive arcade game that makes the best out of a bad situation.

RATING: B+
If you have some old downloaded tracks from Rock Band on your hard drive, or just looking for a fun music game without complications, give Rock Band Blitz a shot.

Xbox 360 version reviewed, also on PlayStation 3. Downloadable title only.
Developed and published by Harmonix

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