Rock Band Blitz

I’ll keep this simple. If, like me, you played and loved the PlayStation 2 rhythm action stalwarts Frequency and Amplitude then buy Rock Band Blitz right away. Go on; get. If you’ve never played these games, you don’t need to worry, Harmonix have you covered.

Now for a confession: I’m not very good at Guitar Hero and Rock Band. I can fumble at the guitar and can sing my way through any song I know for a decent enough score but I’ve never really gotten to that zen-like state that I find myself in when playing Lumines or Frequency. I am particularly awful at the drums. I used to be a drummer. Not a very good drummer but still it was a disappointment that I’ve never found my mojo in the genre.

In Rock Band Blitz you are tasked with keeping the separate elements of a song running by yourself. Each instrument track has left and right notes to tap out along with the song and you need to keep each track filled as best you can by hopping from track to track. Get it right and you’ll hear the song playing loud and true. Get it even more right and you’ll enter Blitz mode for even more points. Get it wrong, however, and any track you’ve not shown enough skill love to will begin to fade and the song will begin to sound lopsided. You can’t fail a track in any literal sense; you just play and do your best. At first you’ll just be trying to keep the song balanced right through but soon the game will get its score-based hooks into you and you’ll be pushing yourself harder and cursing yourself for dropping notes on tricky track changes.

You can attempt to make your life easier or boost your score with unlockable power ups that are purchased with coins. As they unlock you can select three power ups for each song run you make. Some are triggered manually, some will cause special notes to appear in song and others will reward you for particular actions. The key here is that you’ll generally not make enough coins from playing a song to pay for all the coins you spent on a full compliment of power ups which means you’ll likely end up taking practice runs at a track over and over to rack up coins then spend them all on a fully powered attempt at a high score.

In some ways the game is quite forgiving. As I said, you can’t fail and once you’ve entered Blitz mode you won’t drop right out for a single mistake. But mistakes of any kind don’t get high scores and the high score is really what this is all about. At all times and at every opportunity you are reminded that someone on your friend list is beating your score on a particular song. It’s even tracked in real time while you are playing by a meter you’d do well to ignore. The meta game of beating your friends is core to the Blitz experience; anyone with even the slightest competitive streak will easily become lost to the call. Just one more try. Just a few more power ups.

The game comes with 25 tracks whose quality and suitability will entirely be down to your personal taste. These songs will also be added to your Rock Band library so are playable in Rock Band 3 as full instrument supporting tracks. That alone makes the 1,200 point price tag seem quite sweet. Conversely, any tracks you have ever downloaded from the Rock Band store will be playable right away in Blitz. The same goes for any songs you have exported for Rock Band 3 from Rock Band, Rock Band 2, Lego, Greenday, etc. It’s worth noting that if you have not yet done this export you will need the in box export code and need to buy an export licence. It’s not a high cost and you’ll be getting a huge amount of additional track to play in Blitz (and Rock Band 3). Most important is that The Gambler by Kenny Rogers DLC track is both supported in Blitz and amazing to play.