Rock Band 3 - Game Review

Pros: Combines gaming with musicianship. Good song list.
Cons: Long piano-less stretches. Underwhelming career mode.

It’s always exciting when a new Rock Band game comes out and that huge box arrives at your door with a slew of cool peripherals. I was particularly excited about Rock Band 3, which promised to revolutionize band-style games by going beyond five-button toy instruments to real ones. I imagined my friends coming over and playing Bohemian Rhapsody on the elaborate guitar, bass, keyboards and drums, with three part harmony. I wasn’t sure how I’d fit the seven people necessary into my small apartment.

But after its release, the game didn’t come, and didn’t come. And finally I emailed a contact who said, we’ll send the game out to you right away, and a few days later I received the game. Just the game. No instruments. And I emailed back and said, “What am I supposed to do with this?”

I was told the game’s designer, Harmonix, had contracted out the manufacture of these fancy new peripherals to a third party, and this made it hard for them to ship out full bundles. This explained why one of the most anticipated games of the year has received so few reviews in the gaming press. Finally Harmonix said they would loan me a keyboard so I could actually try out the game they had sent me.

I tell you all this to explain why this isn’t quite a full review of Rock Band 3. I have not tried out the new guitar, which has a separate button corresponding to each string and each fret of a real guitar or the elaborate new drum kit. I have not played it with my friends. True, the game is compatible with the old instruments in its simple mode, but what would that tell me, except that with the old instruments, Rock Band 3 is just like Rock Band 2?

This then, is a review of the keyboard component of Rock Band 3 only.

When I first heard RB3 was adding keyboards to the standard guitar/drum/vocals band-game lineup, I pictured a plastic board with five colored buttons, which would have been in keeping with the previous Rock Band games’ five-button guitars. Instead, Harmonix uses a two-octave keyboard. It’s a real keyboard; it’s got a midi-port so you can run it through a mixer.

For each instrument the game has a standard mode and a pro mode. In standard mode, you use the leftmost five keys of the keyboard, and it plays just like previous Rock Band games. Doing this is perfectly enjoyable, and on the more difficult settings it is quite challenging. It feels very much like it felt to play an instrument in the other games, and you do feel a little like a rock star as you press buttons and the music plays.

In Pro Keys mode though, you don’t just feel like a rock star. You feel like a musician.

In standard mode, the indicator that tells you when to press each key is the same as the old one, a road with five lines with colored markers that tell you when to press each key (since those bottom five keys are not color-coded the colors don’t mean much, and seem to be there for the sake of consistency).

Things are very different in Pro Keys mode. Now the indicator shows a swath of the keyboard 10 white keys wide. There are 15 white keys on the keyboard, so sections of the board are color coded to indicate where your fingers should go.

The easier songs are in the key of C, which means you only use the white keys. In some songs the simplest thing to do is just keep your hands in place and press the appropriate keys, although elsewhere it makes more sense to play like a real pianist, striking chords by moving your hand from position to position. In some particularly difficult songs the indicator will shift to show different sections of the keyboard, which is insanely difficulty to follow.

This is all pretty complicated (medium difficulty in Pro mode is about as hard as expert difficulty in the standard mode), so the game includes a set of elaborate tutorials that ask you to play scales and chord progressions. The more advanced lessons are almost as difficult as playing actual songs on a high difficulty setting.

In Pro Keys mode you feel like you are really playing piano. But are you? I decided to figure out how close the highest-difficulty version of a song is to the actual song.

For this test I chose Imagine, which is both a strong piano song and relatively easy to play. On the expert difficulty setting the song is quite hard, but happily RB3 offers a training mode in which you can perfect a song section by section, slowing down the speed and learning the fingering then speeding up until you have it. While I never quite perfected Imagine, I can, according to the game, get about 93% of the song right.

Once I had the song more-or-less memorized I sat down at the piano someone gave me years ago. This was not easy, as it was covered with clothes and games and snack foods (I don’t really play anymore) but once it was cleared off I played what I had learned.

It was not quite Imagine as John Lennon plays it, but it was quite close. The

RB3 version sounds thinner because the lower hand is generally not doing chords but simply picking out single notes. But it’s probable that once you have the RB3 version down, learning the real version wouldn’t be all that much more difficult.