With all the rhythm games out there now that use those little plastic guitars, it is getting easier to become disenchanted with the whole experience. Activision and Red Octane in particular have been milking the Guitar Hero franchise ever since they ripped it from the bosom of its original programmers at Harmonix.

So when Harmonix (you know, the guys that took Konami’s original “Guitar Freaks” concept and improved on it by leaps and bounds?) themselves announced that they would be releasing not one, but two off-shoots of their popular Rock Band franchise, the eyebrow began to raise. “Lego Rock Band” is still a few months off and will have to prove itself when it does finally release. But in the here and now, we have “The Beatles: Rock Band”, a game that, unlike Guitar Hero: Has-been Metal Band, features the songs and performances of only one band.

Many have asked the question; Are the songs of a single band, even one as influential and well known as The Beatles, enough to sustain a quality gaming experience?

An experience is exactly what the folks at Harmonix were going for. The goal seems to have been total Beatles fan immersion and this is where the game really succeeds.

Rather than the World Tour mode of “Rock Band 2″, the songs are presented in a list format, grouped by era. Unlike previous Rock Band and Guitar Hero games where the songs were in order of difficulty, The Beatles: Rock Band lists them in chronological order.

The standard Rock Band gameplay is in place with the big addition this time around being harmonies. Unfortunately, you can’t use the standard Xbox headsets, so I was not able to try them out. You can, however, use any standard USB headset according to the games manual, so I may try to pick up a few USB headset mics and try it out at a later time.

Each era of the band’s music is book-ended with very artsy montages of pictures of the band, album covers, and psychedelic animations. The eras are broken up into famous venues they played throughout the course of their career.

Once you get into the time when the Beatles had stopped touring and were only doing studio work on their albums, it switches from the famous venues to colorful and creative “dreamscapes”. It is obvious that a lot of thought and care went into each of the dreamscapes to make it as magically fan service heavy as it could be, while still going hand-in-hand with the song you are playing. They aren’t just the same scenes of “them playing on stage” all the time. These are customized to fit each individual song’s mood and feel.

The dreamscapes are finished out with the famous Rooftop Concert, with an appropriate encore of The End.

The Beatles: Rock Band is a streamlined experience when compared to previous Rock Band games. You don’t make characters, you don’t have a world tour mode to mess with, and many of the songs are simple to play, even for someone new to the franchise. Setting the game on Easy automatically turns on No-fail Mode. It is also a lot quicker to log players in and out, since there are less menus to scroll through. This makes changing band members quick and painless.

As you finish each section in Story Mode, you unlock special “Challenge Modes”. Here you have to play all the songs from each section of the game in one go, in order. Your score, multipliers, and “Beatlemania” (this versions name for overdrive) all carry over from song to song until you have completed the set.

If you are one of those Beatles haters, and I know they are out there, The Beatles: Rock Band probably won’t convince you that you are wrong (which you are). Even for the casual Beatles fan, this may convince you to finally try out this whole “Rhythm Game” phenomenon that everyone else has been talking about for the last several years.

Tags: 360, Harmonix, rhythm game, Rock Band, The Beatles, The Beatles: Rock Band, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.