While the more 'hardcore' folks salivate over the latest online competitive shoot 'em up more, local multiplayer with friends sharing a sofa is one of those things we're majorly into here at Everybody Plays. Whether it's subtly nudging a mate on Mario Kart to give yourself an advantage, trash talking on Super Smash Bros., or working together on a particularly tricky LittleBigPlanet level, there's a certain social aspect to playing games with everyone huddled around a TV together that online will never quite match.
But one of our favourite games to play together, back in the day, was Rock Band. Its mix of easy pick-up-and-play button-matching gameplay, killer soundtrack and camaraderie won us over and kept us coming back for many, many years to come. At least that is, until the series ground to a halt almost half a decade ago, as the series suddenly came to a grinding halt overnight, with Rock Band itself quietly being killed off, and series developers Harmonix moving on to other projects. Having long lamented the loss of one of our favourite games, we were overjoyed when we heard Rock Band would be making it's triumphant return this year - and even happier to find that we could try it out at last week's gamescom, before it hits shelves this October! And so, we got up on the makeshift stage, alongside Harmonix's Project Managers Dan Sussman and Eric Pope, picked up our plastic guitars and set about trying our hands at the new freestyle guitar solos and more. Well, technically our editor Ian monopolised the guitar, being a bit of a one-instrument kind of guy, while Sarah did the rounds on all the other instruments.
Imagine this, but with more sparkling water.
Arguably the biggest addition to this year's Rock Band 4, guitarists, being the big show-offs they are, can now showboat even more by effectively 'writing' their own solos on the fly. When entering a solo section in a song - in our case Scandal's cheesy 80s rock song, 'The Warrior' - the note track disappears and is replaced by some generalised shapes and patterns, which tell you the sort of thing you have to do. If you see some blue diamonds on the screen, for example, you have to strum using the big note keys, at the end of the guitar, while if the diamonds are orange, you'll need to quickly jump up to the smaller solo buttons. What you actually play here, however, is up to you - you can hold any buttons you want, and any combination, and you'll end up playing something that sounds amazing. How it actually works is a little bit complex, as the game effectively takes a riff, or a note that would fit with the song, and assigns it to each button, so you can sort of technically kind of write your own solos. Ish. It's not quite as flexible as it sounds, but there's one thing that's certain - even if you have the musical talent of a brick, so long as you can hold a button and strum in time, you can sound awesome.
There are a few other different things the game might ask you to do in the solo sections too. Solid blocks of colour ask you to hold the note or chord you're playing, a wiggly line indicates you need to hold the guitar more vertical, a la all the greatest shredders, while straight, horizontal metronome style lines across the track simply say you should strum rhythmically, whether fast or slow. It's a surprisingly simple system, but thanks to some crazy technical wizardry it sounds seriously impressive - even if the only song you can play on a real guitar is the Seven Nation Army riff. If you'd prefer to try and play the solos from songs in their original, unaltered form, though, the Rock Band devs have you covered here too, as at the touch of a button (up on the d-pad, as it turns out), you can disable the improvised solos, and get your traditional note matching solo back. Bass meanwhile, remains the same as it ever was - although some freestyle bass solos would have certainly been a sight to… well, hear!
Fortunately Harmonix had a handy cardboard sign to explain all the new guitar solo notation before we jumped in!
In all honesty, we are the world's worst drummer - apart from being somewhat anomalously able to flail our way through Marilyn Manson's The Beautiful People on the hardest difficulty, we generally tend to stick around on medium or so. But, as our usual drummer was unavailable, we we were left with no choice but to step in and test it out on his behalf, bashing our way through Jack White's Lazaretto as well as we could. Foolishly egged on by our band mates to try it out on hard, we soon regretted the decision thanks to the slightly off beat bass notes - but for a song we'd previously written off as 'one of the crap ones', it was surprisingly fun to play, and nowhere near as boring as we'd worried. The new drum fills are entirely optional too, as while you're given some notes to attempt to hit, all you'll need to do to trigger your score-increasing star power is whack the last note, as missing all the rest doesn't really seem to affect your score or note streak. Previous Rock Band games have instead given you a short freestyle section - something which we always found kind of daunting and awkward, as even in the space of four bars or so we'd have managed to go totally out of time - so giving you some kind of foundation to build on, particularly if you're a bit of a novice, is especially welcome.
After scoring a whopping 72% on Lazeretto, we decided to go with an instrument we felt a bit more comfortable with - vocals. Having finished all the songs on all the previous Rock Bands on the hardest 'Expert' difficulty, we'd argue we probably know our way around a microphone by now - even if we don't like singing within the potentially-scrutinising earshot of another human being, but we swallowed our nerves and aced our way through Weezer's Buddy Holly and Message in a Bottle by The Police (100%! Check it!). Much like the other instruments, those performing on vocals now have a bit more freedom here too, with the game actually giving you a bonus for improvising - so long as you're singing something complimentary to the song, in the right key, you'll be rewarded for it. That said, we found ourselves mostly sticking to the tried and true melody lines - although the new system did save us from screwing up a few sections when we forgot how the song went!
The little pie chart under the lyrics line fills up orange for improvised vocals, blue for singing the original melody or a mix of the two.
Being huge Rock Band fans, it comes as little surprise that we really enjoyed our time with the game, only putting down our instruments when the next appointment was banging on the door. Seemingly, nothing perks you up at 6:30pm on the final day of a rather hot, sticky and exhausting gamescom like a few rounds of Rock Band 4, which really helped end our show on a high note. Outside of the new freestyle guitar solos, it may still be the same game it was way back in 2007 - but that doesn't make it any less addictively awesomely fun. As the saying goes, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Rock Band 4 will be rocking it's way onto the Playstation 4 and Xbox One this autumn, on the 6th October - we're all counting down the days here at Everybody Plays towers!
