After a hiatus, the Plastic Rockers are back with a head-to-head comparison of the season's two big rhythm games.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that on 9-9-09 Harmonix released The Beatles: Rock Band. Not to be outdone, Activision came out with Guitar Hero 5 one week earlier. While I’m a devout Rock Band 2 loyalist, I do love me some new tunes. So, I put both new games into my Game Fly que and anxiously awaited their arrival. Here’s my take on both…
The Guitar Hero franchise has been a game looking for an identity for some time now. Are they a guitar game or a band game? Are they a super hard game or a fan friendly game? Do they wish to distribute via DLC or disc release? So far, while they’ve had some small successes, they seem to be missing notes in the process and losing market share to Harmonix. With the onslaught of Guitar Hero discs being released just this year, it’s almost easy to overlook GH5 as just another music disc for the franchise. That would be a big mistake.
Guitar Hero 5 is unquestionably the best Guitar Hero game I’ve ever played. The note charting appears to be slightly more difficult at the higher levels to give the “expert” players more of a challenge, yet still accessible for the novice. This could be due to song selection or a conscious effort on the part of the developer, but either way most players seems to be pacified by it. Even the vocal charting and scoring has been improved. It’s now much easier to maintain a streak and to see where you’re at on the pitch meter. The one exception for chart improvements is in the drum charting. Maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s the fact I’m using a 4-pad Ion kit and the game doesn’t convert the 5-pad chart very well. Either way, the drum charts suck.
Setting track charting aside though, the real improvement is in the game mechanics itself. You no longer have to coordinate with your party about who will play what. If you want to drum and there’s already a drummer logged on, you can come in on drums anyway. In fact, any player in the party is allowed to play any instrument they want. Better still, you don’t have to drop out of the party to switch instruments. There are two minor complaints here. One: getting back to the game lobby to switch instruments or pick up new players is a bit confusing. Two: players on a guitar instrument ought to be able to switch on the fly between lead and bass as songs are selected instead of backing all the way to the lobby.
The next improvement is in the Tour mode of the game. Just like GH:WT any online progress made in a tour counts toward your personal tour progress. That’s something Rock Band really needs to work on. Also, the tour is now one unified event. There’s no, drum tour, guitar tour, band tour. It’s all one and the same. Play some songs by yourself on drums and later in a band on vocals and you still progress through your tour. This is great for keeping things simple but I would say that it can make the game shorter than I’d like. I was able to complete a tour in just three nights (I’m guessing six or so hours of play). The redundancy of playing the same song over and over on the Rock Band Tour did get old, but at least it took some time and effort to finish. There’s got to be a better balance.
Another interesting new feature is the challenges associated with each song in the tour. Each song has a special goal attached to it for players to work on. It might be “Reach X number of seconds in sustain” for a song or “Maintain a 4x multiplier” for a certain amount of time. Each challenge is based on a particular instrument or band so even if you complete a song on Guitar you may find yourself wanting to got back and beat the challenge on drums to earn another Diamond Challenge Plaque.
If you like the songs and enjoy rhythm type games, I’d say this is a must buy or at the very least a must rent. There’s a decent amount of replayability in the game as you try to complete challenges and farm for achievements that can be difficult yet attainable. But the catch is you've got to like the songs. My wife played a good portion of the game with me and while she enjoyed playing bass guitar, she hated most of the tracklist, which leads me to The Beatles: Rock Band...
When trying to make comparisons between these two new games, I’ve done my best to try and leave the tracklist out of the equation. The bottom line is, if you love The Beatles, then you’re probably going to love TB:RB. It’s a game made purely for Beatles fans. For me, that’s where the problem lies. I’m not a big Beatles fan. I enjoy a few of their songs, but I don’t worship at the altar of Lennon and McCartney. So, if I look at just the game and ignore the songs chosen, what am I left with?
First, I will admit the graphics and video elements of the game are quite beautiful at times. You can tell right away that a lot of effort was put into creating a game that reflected The Beatles sensibility. The tour is set up to follow the actual Beatles timeline of progress instead of an easy to hard difficulty track like most band games do. That’s kind of cool. However, the tour is extremely linear. Unlike RB2 or GH5, you have to play a full venue before you unlock the next venue and so forth in order to beat the game. Once you’ve finally beat a song you can go back and play it again in the tour if you’d like, but you can’t move forward without completing all songs. This is like a step back to old RB1 days.
The other complaint I have with the game is the harmony support. If you want to sing harmony, you better find a local group. It ain’t happening over XBL. Maybe there’s some technical reason for it, but it seems like a glaring omission to me. Other than that, the game feels very much like a Rock Band game. Given the awesomeness of past Rock Band titles, I’d say that’s a plus.
Beyond those minor complaints, there’s not much more I can say about The Beatles: Rock Band. If you really love The Beatles, you’ll surely get into all the little videos, factoids and outtake clips littered throughout the game. Being only a casual fan myself though, I didn’t find much in the game that compelled me to want to play it repeatedly. There are a few tracks that I wish I could import to RB2 but there’s a lot of poppy stuff that I’d just as soon never play again as well.
In trying to compare the two games, I’ve been conscious to leave out too much about track selection and note charting. Bottom line is you either like the songs or you don’t and that probably plays a large part in your purchase. Likewise, you’ve probably already made up your mind about whose note tracks you think play better. There’s not enough significant change in either game to make you change your mind there either. So if I look just at the game itself, the winner in my book is Guitar Hero 5. There’s simply more depth, more options and more replayability packed into that game than in TB:RB. I’m not saying one game is bad and one isn’t, but as a game, GH5 is better. The Beatles was made purely for Beatles fans while GH5 was made for fans of rhythm based games at large.
