Hey… Well, this is awkward. How have you been? I’m not good with apologies, so…
ROCK BAND BLITZ!
There. We cool?
So Rock Band Blitz was released earlier this week and it forced me to come out of retirement, which is a shame cause I really enjoyed Florida, they got oranges there, you know.
So, on Thursday, I was all bored and stuff so I was browsing through the Xbox marketplace when I saw that I could buy Rock Band Blitz, I wasn’t really looking forward to this game, I knew it was coming out but I wasn’t eagerly anticipating like some kind of… person.. that anticipates… things. So, I downloaded the trial and gave it a try. I was impressed but I wasn’t ready to buy it. So I started browsing through the Arcade game section again, then I saw that “The Walking Dead Episode Three” was out. It didn’t take me longer than half a nanosecond to jump, screaming like a banshee, out of the window and start booking it to the nearest place I could buy some Microsoft points. While I was flailing my arms about, I decided I would just go ahead and get enough Microsoft points to buy Rock Band Blitz along with Episode Three. This review is about Rock Band Blitz, I can drool over The Walking Dead some other time. I was actually glad I ended up buying Blitz because it’s a heap of fun and I genuinely enjoy playing the game.
The game doesn’t have a story, so… I can’t go with that route.
Umm… I’m totally lost right now. So, how you been?
GAME MECHANICS!!
In traditional Rock Bands the notes travel down these note “highways” In Rock Band Blitz you can just go ahead and take the quotation marks off of highway and replace “note” with, rectangles on the left or right. Blitz literally takes place on a highway that runs through a city, the buildings and stuff bounce around with the beat, so if you have a shaky state of mind you might want to skip this title. The gameplay boils down to either tapping the A button or a direction on the D-pad to hit either the left or right notes, you can press X to activate a power up, given you have enough energy to activate it. Power ups are used to get more points or help you complete a particularly troublesome part. You are also required to switch between tracks using the RB and LB or RT and LT. There are either four or five tracks depending on the song. The tracks from left to right go as follows, Drums, Bass, Guitar, Vocals, and Keyboards. The colour (I’m Canadian, don’t judge me) of the tracks line up to the colour of the notes in the previous Rock Band’s Green, Red, Yellow, Blue and Orange.
GAME PLAYS!
Like I already explained the controls, but not how it works. See, you start off with a multiplier of one to four, each note is only worth ten points, it’s your job to get each tracks multiplier up three times before a checkpoint comes up, if you fail to get any of the tracks up to the maximum you’ll have to get the specified tracks up to X number multiplier before the next. If you manage to increase all the tracks to the maximum multiplier before the checkpoint, the multiplier is buffed up by three more multiplication… thingys. You do that until the song is over. How you get a track to gain a multiplier number is by playing a determined amount of notes in a row, if you miss a note the end of the note section is moved ahead by one note so you’ll have to catch up. Once you nail a section part of the track will light up, which is a nifty feature, once the track is completely lit up, then you have no more purpose there. You can use Power ups to make this process easier, with some of them clearing up a whole section of notes, or one that plays a track for you so you can worry about getting to the other ones. This whole mechanic can also be slightly nerve-wracking. If you’ve never played a song before you won’t know when certain instruments start and stop playing. So while you’re trying to get the bass part to light up completely and there’s a guitar part playing right next to it that you’re planning on playing next, you think that the guitar is going to keep on playing but suddenly it stops and you’re left with the bass line that keeps on going on after the guitar line. So you need to plan ahead to determine which tracks have the most notes and play the ones with the least notes first, to get them out of the way.
SONG SELECTION!
Rock Band Blitz comes reloaded with 25 song, ranging from great (These Days by Foo Fighters) to okay (Shout by Tears For Fears) to the “OH MAY GAUOSH! HOW COULD THEY DO THIS TO ME!?” (Moves Like Jagger by Maroon 5)
Every song is DLC for other Rock Bands and every DLC from the other Rock Bands is compatible with this game. So if you’ve never played a Rock Band and you’ve never bought any songs you’re best off skipping this game. Another thing that’s really cool is the fact that this game only costs 1200 Microsoft points which is $15. If you just download a song they cost 160 MS points which is $2. Meaning that you get 24 (yeah, I know what I said.) songs for the price of you know… however many that is, plus a brand new game, which is deals.
All in all this game is at least worth a play. The 19 good and decent songs don’t make this game an amazing buy unless you already have previous Rock Band games and purchased some songs for them.
Rock Band Blitz gets a
You know
A thing
Out of a thing