Rock Band 4 Band In-A-Box Unboxing Video and Impressions

It’s nearly intoxicating when it’s at its peak – for instance, when you’re all playing perfectly in synch, deploying your Overdrive power together at a key moment in a legendary song all of you know by heart in order to octuple your score.

It’s been years since the flood of fake plastic music instruments abated, the swarms of rhythm games finally dissipating amid flagging sales.

Daniel Sussman, production manager for Rock Band 4, talk to GRTV about the new iteration of the famous music game from Harmonix. Register now for our GamesBeat 2015 event, October 12-Oct.13, where we’ll explore strategies in the new world of gaming. For those craving a Rock Band experience, however, Rock Band 4 comes at a ideal time. That’s likely necessary to keep things sounding good, but it’s still annoying. It’s somewhat understandable from a pure music standpoint that numerous fills didn’t actually match up with the music, and were just people flailing away as a low-rent Buddy Rich. But that’s what was so fun about these classic fills. I don’t want to play it every day forever and ever, but it’s definitely worth the time I invested in it, and I’ll be picking it up again to relive the fun sometime down the line. We weren’t able to get our hands on a legacy adapter, but we did get a band-in-a-box bundle for review. For one, depending on the color displayed, notes must be hit on either the top or the bottom of the guitar’s neck. Additionally, there were tracks purchased that didn’t show up as paid for at all in the DLC menu, which was more than a little frustrating. In the gladiatorial history of rhythm-action games, it has been Guitar Hero versus Rock Band, two franchises that enjoyed such accelerated success there seemed to be no time at all between them minting a new genre and completely saturating the market. Even though I created more than one custom character, I was unable to assign them to the other band positions. Rock Band wants you to pretend you’re a musician, and nothing accomplishes this better than drums do. This is in contrast to quick play, where every song is an individual experience. On the PS4 store, though, prelaunch seems a bit spotty. Track packs (read: those discs of songs you bought) are being worked on now, and aren’t up for launch.

Rock Band 4 is as fun as the series has ever been.

That Rock Band 4 exists is just shy of being a miracle.

Conversely, Rock Band 4’s new career mode, called the Tour, is by far the series’ strongest campaign yet.

Though the base of the Rock Band recipe has remained intact, Harmonix has spiced things up with this return. I also couldn’t shake the feeling that the whole experience was a little rote.

During our interview he explains how in the new Freestyle Guitar Mode the studio has “cracked an old problem” that has affected previous entries. That might sound harmless, but for those of you with a tracklist in the hundreds, well, you might want to book an afternoon off of work. We can not confirm if this is the case today, so leave a comment if you’ve seen cheaper prices anywhere. There’s no difference between older versions of the instruments and the new ones. Harmonix wasn’t looking to mix up the formula for its own sake. After that, it was on to greener pastures, as the developer used its past experience to create the game it always wanted to make. Firstly, you’ll have to follow their compatibility chart here to see if your device will even work with the new game. It was probably the least popular instrument of the four, but it’s still sad to see it go. No rock star would be complete without a few embellished on-stage behavior, mirrored in the Overdrive mechanic, which, once you’ve gained enough energy, you activate by tilting your guitar or bass high up, mimicking something you might have seen from an 80’s hair band. As much fun as it was to play freestyle on an on-disc track like The Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love”, these solos have been implemented brilliantly into older tracks like The White Stripes’ “Icky Thump”. As noted late last week, the process of recovering old songs is a cumbersome one, requiring users to access the first-party digital stores to download each track one at a time. It is the Rock Band 2 drum kit that’s been updated for the new system. For one, its enormous amount of DLC might be as much of a burden as it is a strength. They’re banking on the fact that you already own a ton of DLC, or are willing to shell out for it. That’s going to be a point of contention for many people, who may have started out in the Rock Band ecosystem on Xbox, but like most of this generation, have since switched to PS4 exclusively. First and foremost, all of that money you spent on downloadable songs will not go to waste-players can transfer over their extra tunes from their Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 library to bolster their Xbox One and PlayStation 4 Rock Band 4 setlists. And just months later, the comeback tour has begun with Rock Band 4. Options can include specific songs or more general categories, such as “80’s Rock”.

It’s been years since the original plastic instrument era ended.

But I think this weaker setlist is kind of what Harmonix is going for.

Rock Band 4 feels like both a necessity and an afterthought. And few would argue that bringing Rock Band’s enormous catalog to modern consoles isn’t a good idea. It’s as simple as syncing the instruments (which is incredibly easy to do now) and pressing start, then you’re ready to rock.

Rock Band 4 doesn’t try to do anything particularly new. So, Xbox 360 DLC can move to Xbox One, and PlayStation 3 to PS4.