Rock Revolution

October 20,2008 - Konami’s had a long history in the rhythm game genre. They’re most well known for their Dance Dance Revolution series, but have had a good bit of success with their Karaoke Revolution games on the home consoles as well. In Japan they’ve had guitar and drum games for years, but they’ve never brought those games to North America. With the success of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises though, it’s clear that Konami wants to get back into that market. Rock Revolution is what they’re jumping into the game with.

You’ll be able to play guitar, drums, and bass, but you won’t be able to sing. Rock Revolution doesn’t feature vocals. Konami must figure that Karaoke Revolution already does a good job of that, and it does, but if you’re going to do a band based game, you might as well go all the way. That’s really the whole story with Rock Revolution, there’s stuff there, but it’s just not really implemented well.

Developer Zoe Mode opted for a 2D note chart instead of the 3D one that’s become the standard in Guitar Hero and Rock Band. The notes themselves are large and easy enough to see. The trouble is that because they’re so large they take up a lot of space so the playfield has to scroll down a lot quicker than you would expect it to. This makes songs harder than they ought to be. It also doesn’t help that the game seems to be very picky when it comes to registering hit notes. It’s far more precise than it should or needed to be.

The drumming is a little bizarre at first. This is especially true if you’ve spent any time with Rock Band (Which anyone looking at this game will doubtlessly have done.) since rather than using a horizontal line across the playfield to denote a bass note it uses a dedicated lane. When you combine that with the drum peripheral’s odd layout it makes for a steeper learning curve than should have been necessary

The drums themselves are quite well built and they’re very responsive. They have a very solid square tube frame that you have to bolt together. The kit’s bass pedal looks very similar to the original Rock Band pedal, so only time will tell as to how durable it will be. We haven’t had any issues with it as of yet. Rock Revolution’s drum kit works quite well, it just looks awful. It looks more toy-like than instrument like, which may put some people off. On the whole though, it’s a decent peripheral and if you want to get the best drum experience out of this game you should try to pick one up. If you can’t find one though, the game does support the Rock Band drum kit, so you can also use that.

When you move to guitar things get even more bizarre. The game has several difficulty levels from Beginner all the way to Expert. The Easy through Expert difficulty levels follow the same conventions as Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Easy uses three frets, Medium uses four, Hard and Expert use all five. Beginner is new, and is a mode where there are even fewer notes than Easy and only the Green and Red fret buttons worry about. This is really for those who have never in their lives picked up any of these games.

It’s obvious from the charting of the notes on the various difficulties that Zoe Mode is very inexperienced with this genre. Three button chords are used even more frequently than they were in Guitar Hero 3. Worse still is that they’ll even appear on the Medium difficulty, which is a charting no-no. Players at that level should not need to deal with three button chords. There are some rather questionable charting choices strewn throughout the game. Some solos are far too simple for what they sound and some riffs are simple sounding and charted with odd chord changes.

One of the game’s unique features is the Studio mode. Here you can go in and create your own songs. Unfortunately once you do this you can’t actually play them in the game, they’re limited to the Jam Session mode.

You can play the game online, and this is where the game has something that Rock Band currently doesn’t have. You can assemble your three piece band and compete against another three piece band for the highest score. The game also offers co-op and vs. modes for the various instruments.

Visually the game is less than impressive. You’ll see the same people over and over again in the crowd. Your on-stage band looks like it’s made up of plastic dolls. They keep repeating the same generic animation that doesn’t seem to coincide at all with anything that’s happening in the song you’re playing. Even when you’re focusing on the notes that are coming at you, this is still pretty noticeable as your eye tends to get drawn by that same segment of animation that you thought you saw a few seconds ago.

The most important part of a music game is the music. This is where Rock Revolution could have saved itself, and to some degree does. It has a good set of songs to play through including some songs that haven’t been in other games yet. Metallica’s Am I Evil? Is present, as is Pantera’s Walk, Rush’s The Spirit of Radio, Dream Theater’s Pull Me Under and Megadeth’s Holy Wars… The Punishment Due. Unfortunately none of the tracks on the soundtrack are master recordings. They are all covers. When this genre was just getting started and bands were not sure they wanted to be part of a videogame, having cover tracks was the only option. With the success of the other games though, Master recordings have gotten more prevalent and are even starting to become a requirement. People want master tracks. They don’t want an approximation of Lars Ulrich’s drum track; they want to be playing along to the real thing. Another shortcoming is the number of songs. There are only 40 songs on the disc, and this is a full priced game.

On the whole, Rock Revolution just falls short on every level. If Konami wants to get back into this genre they’re going to have to do much better than this. The bar has been raised now, and if they want to compete in this soon to be crowded market they’ll have to go back to take it again from the top.

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