Beatles Rock Band

Rock Band, Guitar Hero and variations on the same theme really are dominating the games market at the moment. With shops trying to convince us to start our Christmas shopping early, retailers and television advertisements alike are crammed to the brim with new titles, covering every (mainstream and extremely popular) genre from hip hop to pop. Slightly less popular genres are, of course, thoroughly ignored, or else tacked onto the end of a genre-spanning game like Guitar Hero 5, whose range of music is so diverse it’s likely not to satisfy anyone. So while Guitar Hero is spreading a thin net over the entire rock and metal scene, Rock Band is cherry picking from one of rock’s most fruitful trees. It’s an idea that Guitar Hero had already toyed with their Metallica and Aerosmith titles, but Rock Band have clearly trumped them, becoming one of the fasting selling games of all time, not necessarily because it’s a better game but because, quite simply, people like the Beatles.

That’s all there is to it, to be honest. The gameplay is almost identical to previous Guitar Hero and Rock Band games, save for perhaps a few more unlockable items (in the form of photos, videos and tracks concerning the band’s career). Guitar Hero’s “Star Power” is replaced by “Beatle Mania” but it works in the same way and the system for the star ratings is easier to see but exposes itself as being as flawed as the points system (the cumulative multipliers still ensure that you’re more likely to score highly if you cock up in earlier in a song than later). The graphics are a little improved, with enough detailing on the band’s faces to see who’s who in an endearingly stylised way with some nice changes over time as they age, and there are some fabulous cut scenes and psychedelic backgrounds to ensure the visuals maintain the same charm as the music. In fact sometimes the visuals are too much: one can’t very easily play and watch the pretty pictures at the same time, but presumably these are added more for the game’s capacity as a party game than for solo enjoyment, giving others in the room something to watch. The resulting experience is a little bit like playing through both the “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Yellow Submarine” films but without the humour, sometimes leaving me pining for the films themselves.

Unfortunately all these pretty extras come at a cost: the story mode is criminally short with only 45 songs to play (compared with the 80 or so on similar recent titles), and though the decision to group songs chronologically rather than by difficulty is cute but ensures that most of the songs are pretty easy, leaving no learning curve. The different difficulties could have made up for this if they weren’t so disparate: Medium is uniformly easy, hard is uniformly hard. So does the rest of the game make up for it? Well almost. Of course if you like the general format and you like the Beatles, you’re going to enjoy it, even I’ll admit it’s a lot of fun, but it’s also more than a little disappointing. The short soundtrack means that lots of real classics are removed: Help, Eleanor Rigby, Strawberry Fields Forever and All You Need is Love, among others, are missing, despite the latter being referenced a dozen times in the cut scenes and unlockables. Presumably these will appear on downloadable content eventually, for those willing to spend even more money on tracks that are already in their CD collections. In terms of Beatles history it’s also heavily sanitised, early band members are neatly omitted, for example, so purist are likely to be disappointed too. To keep players going, the game throws in achievements awards for anything and everything, from calibrating your machine to playing bass left handed, though there seems to be some faults in the achievement system: my copy would award me for things I hadn’t done on some occasions and on others would award me with nameless achievements, though I can’t tell whether this was a problem with my copy alone or with the game’s design.

It may not be quite the sublime experience suggested by title, but it’s still a very enjoyable game, a brilliant concept strengthened by some stunning visuals, and if you’re not smiling as you strum through “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, “I Am the Walrus” and “Dear Prudence” there’s something very wrong with you.