Harmonix have a rich history of Rhythm Action games and with their new download only version of Rock Band things have almost come full circle.
Rock Band Blitz brings things back to the controller. Instead of pressing lots of buttons to create riffs each instrument only requires two buttons. I used down and X for left and right buttons. As those buttons cross the path of your button line, you press the buttons to play each instrument. You swap between each instrument with the shoulder buttons. This is very similar to original Harmonix games Frequency and Amplitude. To help along the way you now also have power ups to help improve your score or blast blocks out the way during busy sections to help you. Things really have come full circle.
Where things are completely different is the scoring for each song. Hitting several notes for each instrument lets you increase the score multiplier on that instrument (drums, bass, guitar, vocals and keyboards). Each song is also divided into sections and you can raise each track a maximum of three multipliers per song section. If you do this, it’ll let you raise the multiplier a further three for the next section but if say you only get the drums up by a single multiplier, you’re then limited to only one additional multiplier for everything in the next section. Suddenly strategy in now involved because you must work out which is the easiest times to get the multipliers for each track. It’s a nifty little change in the mechanics of the game that really changes things up.
As such there’s no multiplayer but there’s online scoreboards and a song wats mode where you can send challenges to your rivals and they have just over 2 hours playtime to beat you and send the challenge back again.
Positives
~25 tracks and any DLC from before all count
~Very easy to pick up but hard to master the score modes
~Great overall production
Negatives
~No difficulty adjustments but then you can’t technically fail a song either
Conclusion
A great entry point to the series but also a great game in its own right. I still think I prefer Frequency & Amplitude but this is still a fantastic controller based experience for Rock Band fans.