Gameitall If your like me, you probably have a lot of Rock Band DLC that’s taking up way too much space on your hard drive. It just sits there waiting to be played the next time your friends stop by and decide it’s time to pick up the plastic instruments once again, something that rarely happens anymore. The sad part is that the music genre has died along time ago, kept on the lifeline of new songs and downloadable content.
It seems that the team at Harmonix knows this sad truth, so they created Rock Band Blitz, a one player music game with thinly veiled social media mechanics that uses all of your Rock Band DLC.
On the surface of the game you can see a mixture of other games in the genre such as Audiosurf and Harmonix’s own Frequency, Amplitude and the PSP Rock Band: Unplug. Throughout the game you travel down a musical highway hitting notes to increase your score.
Each song has the potential of having 5 instruments including voice, bass, guitar, drums, and keyboard. Each one of those instruments have two playable notes through the song which are just labeled left or right, and like with the normal Rock Band games, your entire goal is to score as high as possible by hitting the notes. Controlling 5 instruments sounds more difficult then it actually is, the real difficulty and challenge is keeping your score up.
While your hitting the notes your instrument multiplier increases, the higher you can get your multiplier for each instrument, the higher your overall score can get. Multiplier barriers allow you to increase your score past the ‘x4’ multiplier, it’s not unusual to see x14 multipliers by the end of the game if your skilled at bouncing from one track to another.
Blitz is all about the score and that introduces it’s more social aspect. Blitz takes your friends list on your console and Facebook if you connect into Rock Band World and allows you to challenge your friends to a Score War. Giving you 2 days to beat you friends at a specific song in which the winner receives Rock Band Tokens which can be used to purchase power-ups and score boosters.
There is nothing really special about Rock Band Blitz and it doesn’t replace how awesome Rock Band 3 is. What it does right though is give you your money’s worth of extra songs (25 great songs including One Week by Barenaked Ladies, Pump up Kicks by Foster the People, Shine by Collective Soul) and give your DLC some extra life. It’s a fun little casual game for the Rock Band enthusiast who can’t find people to play with him/her.
Rock Band Blitz – 5 out of 10
Pros: Fun Scoring system, Great use of pre-existing DLC, Extra Songs for Rock Band 3.
Cons: Confusing, looks like a Facebook game disguised as an Arcade/PSN title.
