Gameplay Impressions
What do we like?It helps, of course, if you like The Beatles. If you're considering buying this game then we presume that will be case. If so, then you can look forward to an impressive track-list that spans an entire decade and each of the Fab Four's albums, including Rubber Soul, Revolver and Let It Be.
The developer could have chosen from hundreds of songs, but it has done well to whittle them down to 45 tracks that are instantly recognizable and extremely enjoyable to play. Highlights for us while playing certain instruments include "Hey Bulldog's" guitar solo and "The End" which features Ringo's drum solo, but the complete band experience, on practically all of the songs, is as good as it gets when it comes to rhythm games. And when the band does gel together on some of these classic tunes, like we did, for a brief moment in time we felt like we were rock legends, sporting grins on our faces that would make a Cheshire cat look miserable.
The addition of vocal harmonies, which allows up to three people with mics to sing and harmonise, works extremely well and there's some fine examples of songs with nice harmonies, including the likes of "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band" and "I Saw Her Standing There" which showcase the new feature very nicely.
The seamless online play allows you to jump smoothly into an online game, choose a instrument and then play as a complete band without having to have any friends at all and it's this complete band experience that we've enjoyed most about The Beatles: Rock Band; it's here that fans and non-musicians get an inkling of what if must feel like to be part of an iconic band.
Overall, the production and attention to detail is commendable. Artistic Dreamscapes that are intended to transport players to imaginative environments do well to capture the essence of The Beatles’ musical and fashion transformations during their later years and the psychedelic visuals capture that hippie era. The quality of the production really does do The Beatles legacy proud.
The chance to pretend we're in the Beatles, play brilliant songs, and actually sound like we're actually playing the instruments? Where do we sign.
What don't we like?
We were going to complain that the story mode is fairly short, you can easily finish it in an evening, but have no fear there is some cash-cow milking downloadble content on the way. Any Beatles fan is going to feel compelled to buy it and once the collection is complete there's no doubt that we would have paid a pretty packet for the full quota. In fact 45 songs doesn't really seem enough. There are some notable omissions that we would have liked to have been included in the track list, including Help! and The Ballad of John and Yoko. It's a shame they're not here from the outset.
The weakest part of Rock Band is the singing component. We've played a lot of Singstar so we know how it should work. Sony do it extremely well. In The Beatles: Rock Band, however, it's a forgiving mechanic that seems to let you do well even if you've got a voices like a strangled cat. We've managed to get 100% in three Beatle's songs, yet we've never managed that in Singstar, because we know we can't sing well. In fact, overall it is quite an easy game to complete, certainly on Medium difficulty anyway and it's not that tough on hard compared to the previous Rock Band game.
Finally, and we're really picking at straws here, the game ends with a bit of an anti-climax. As the song are in chronological order of their release dates, they're a mix of difficulty levels and therefore the game doesn't build up to a big crescendo, it feels rather flat at the end. We like the drum solo in "The End," but it's not one of our favourite Beatles' songs by a long shot, or one of the ones that feels epic to play.
Final Thoughts
The Beatles: Rock Band is an expensive purchase if you don't already have the Rock Band kit, but if you're a Beatles' fan you won't regret it. We've breezed through the story in a day and had a fantastic time doing so, but now we're going to try to master it on expert level, plus we have plenty of new content to come and many an evening full of song and music ahead of us. The Beatles: Rock Band is an outstanding showcase of how modern day music and rhythm games have evolved; it's the pinnacle of musical, videogame interactive entertainment. Who'd have thought it possible when, in the late 1990's, we were quite happy to play Parappa The Rappa.
Final Score: 9/10
