Rock Band 2

I must say I'm hugely disappointed in this game. I'm a huge fan of Rock Band 1 - I was able to look past the fact that the instruments were made by idiots. I didn't mind the down strum on the rock band guitar broke every five minutes, or that the strum bar didn't have a click to it. I didn't mind the 95% failure rate of the bass pedal on the drum set, nor the fact that it sounded like horse galloping down the road. The game was just that much fun to play - you could get a bunch of friends together and just have a great time.

Rock Band 2 - not so much the case. I was excited when I heard about the new drum kit - as a drummer myself I appreciated that there would be actual elevated cymbals, and it could be used as an electric drum kit by itself. However this only applies to the $300 ION drum kit. The standard one is more of the same, with a reinforced pedal this time. Big whoop.

As for the new guitar, its much of the same. They might have fixed the downstrum (perhaps by spending more than 38 cents on production), but it still doesn't click. If you really want a new guitar, i suggest waiting for the new Guitar Hero one - it's already been announced to work with Rock Band 2.

There aren't many changes in the game itself either. One change I did enjoy was that the song list looks just like the music store in Rock Band 1, so it shows album art, overall difficulty as well as per instrument difficulty, and all the info on the band, song, album, etc. Also, you can make your own playlist for multiplayer quickplay - not a huge deal, I usually can't think of more than one song at a time that I'd like to play anyway, after I've played through all the Boston songs of course. Another aspect I appreciate is that all your DLC carries over, and for a measly $5 you can re license all but maybe three tracks of the original Rock Band playlist. This gives you a truly epic number of songs - if you can be bothered to unlock the whole playlist from 2.

Here is where my biggest beef with the game lies - there is no more straight through solo tour to unlock songs - it's all done through the world tour. Which wouldn't be such a big deal if it didnt make you play the same garbage songs over and over, instead of just once each, to get to anything fun - and I've counted the songs I like from 2, and I think it MAY have reached 15. Out of over 80.

Now I'm not sure about this, but it seems to be the case - the terrible Harmonix bands are still in the game, except they arent labeled as bonus songs. They just come up in world tour like regular songs. Here's a sample of some of the "Rock" you will have to endure time and time again just to unlock Metallica's "Battery" -



So in short, if you dig a lot of the playlist for this game, go ahead and buy it. Otherwise you're looking at essentially the same game with a few minor tweaks, and a whole lot of songs you're probably not interested in playing, that you will NEED to play, many times, in order to get the good stuff. I'm not huge on that.