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Review: Rock Band Blitz

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Rock Band Blitz has been one of the most anticipated digital titles for a few months now. Now that it’s released, you want to know if it was worth the wait – find out below.

Rock Band Blitz

Rock Band is a household name when it comes to gaming nowadays. Harmonix started the saga with Guitar Hero and they continue to innovate and move forward bringing gamers new ways to enjoy their tunes. Blitz is no stranger if you’ve played previous music games from Harmonix, but it has enough new features and a fresh coat of paint to keep it feeling original.

To begin, Rock Band Blitz features 25 songs, all of which are exportable for free to Rock Band 3. Two of these songs were in Rock Band 2, but they couldn’t be exported so that’s a cool addition as well. All your DLC from previous games as well as all future DLC for Rock Band 3 is playable in Blitz as well – your library has the potential to be huge from day one thank to that feature. There’s a downside too though…. Rock Band 3 disc songs are not playable in Blitz, and

What’s so different about Rock Band Blitz you ask? For starters, it doesn’t require instruments to play it. Instead of using the battery operated plastic instruments; players simply need their normal controllers to play the game. It sounds a little weird at first, but it grows on you very quick and becomes extremely addictive to play. The game shows you all available tracks to play at any given time and you can you the triggers to move left and right across the tracks, and use either the analogues or the D-pad/A button to play the notes that appear on the left and right of each track. Highlighted notes can give you energy to launch equipped power-ups and there are the standard short and long notes that we’re all familiar with by now. The more notes you get in a row, the better your score will be. With a streak you’ll enter Blitz mode where everything speeds up until you miss 2-3 notes – this allows you to hit more notes in the same amount of time and increases your score at a faster pace. You can switch tracks during Blitz mode to build up multipliers on the other tracks, but you risk missing notes and deactivating Blitz.

Rock Band Blitz

You’ll quickly come to learn that Blitz is not about hitting every note, but rather getting streaks from track to track and scoring the most points. You won’t be topping the leaderboards without some practice, and there are a few things to learn upfront.  The in-game currency of “coins” are earned by playing songs in your library, each time you play a song for the first time you’ll earn double coins to help you get stocked up. Coins can be redeemed to enable up to a total of three power-ups on any given track. To unlock all the available power-ups in the game, you’ll need to constantly play and earn “Blitz cred” so that adds replay value if you’re into opening up all your options. Power-ups are the key to unlocking the big scores all while adding some new fun features into the game… Pinball Rock Band anyone?

Multipliers are a huge part of the game and each song has checkpoints within it. In each section between these checkpoints, you can reach a particular multiplier level on each instrument track. If you fail to reach a certain point, your cap won’t be raised after the first checkpoint, and you’ll score a limited number of points. It’s best to try and do three multipliers in each section if you can, but it’ll also take some work to pull off. Depending on your ending multipliers you’ll earn a bonus at the end of the song. For example if you’ve got 9x, 11x, 10x, 10x, and 14x you’ll get point bonuses of 900, 1100, 1000, 1000, and 1400 – sometimes this can make all the difference in topping your rival.

Rock Band Blitz

Due to the nature of Rock Band Blitz, one defining feature of Rock Band has been removed for this title – Multiplayer. Since the game revolves around high scores and switching between tracks, it would not be fair to have multiple people covering the tracks, so Harmonix has tried to come up with something new to fill the void. On both PlayStation Network and Xbox LIVE Arcade, players can sync up their Facebook profiles to join Rock Band World (http://apps.facebook.com/rock-band-world/) and you can set goals and try to top your friends’ scores. In the game itself you’ll see rivalry markers and challenges that you can take on and that definitely helps to keep you playing the game. Rock Band World also keeps track of fun stats including your Blitz cred, how many gold stars you’ve earned, and more. It’s a cool feature, but the lack of multiplayer (no matter how much sense it makes for being removed) will still disappoint some.

As for the game soundtrack, it’s pretty damn awesome and includes some great tunes like Jesse’s Girl, Death on Two Legs, and We Are Young. Since the 25 tracks can all be played in Rock Band 3 free of charge, you can basically consider Blitz a $15 DLC pack with a ton of value packed inside. The new way to play is icing on the cake if you wish to see it that way.

Blitz feels fresh and new, but it will still feel familiar at the same time if you’ve played Rock Band. The lacking multiplayer really isn’t a big deal and I’ve already had a blast passing the controller back and forth between songs with my girlfriend and roommates – we all love it. The game looks great and features great music, and the rivalry/challenge features are sure to keep you going up against your friends. You can’t get any better than this for $15 – especially if you own Rock Band 3.

Rating
Description
10.0Gameplay
It's new and old at the same time, and it's really quite fun and offers a very solid challenge to all players. Power-ups and strategies always change.
8.5Graphics
Pretty basic looking track that runs through a cityscape design, looks nice and doesn't have too much going on to distract you from the notes.
10Sound
Blitz has 25 great songs to play, all of which can be added free to Rock Band 3, and the mixing is cool when you switch from one instrument to another.
9.5Final Score
0

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