Rock Band Unplugged [PSP]

25 Jun 2009 at 14:41:04 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (PSP)

If I hear Pearl Jam's Alive one more time today, I'm going to murder someone.

If there's one major failing in Rock Band Unplugged, it's that it suffers from the same problem Rock Band 2 had: the tour mode repeats songs, constantly. Unlocking the next set of songs requires you to get a certain amount of stars on the available events, and with only 41 songs in this PSP release, you're going to be doing a lot of Mystery Song and Make A Setlist events. For me, the former always seem to involve Pearl Jam's Alive. It's not a bad song by any stretch of the imagination, but it wears thin after the sixth or seventh play in two hours.

Rock Band Unplugged is, surprisingly, not a Rock Band game. Oh, it is in all the ways that brand it as Rock Band – it's got the UI, the tour mode, the songs, the note charts – but the lack of plastic instruments to plug into your PSP means that Harmonix had to find another way to connect you to the music. Guitar Hero's DS incarnation did this via a plug-in to the DS' GBA slot and a stylus-based strum interface. Harmonix have skipped out on the gimmicks and instead gone back to their roots, making a rhythm-action game that bears more than a passing resemblance to past titles Amplitude and Frequency.

Every instrument uses the same interface. Four colours scroll down the screen, and you use the face buttons to hit them at the right time, with each playing a note (yes, even for singing.) So far, so Rock Band. Where it changes is that you aren't playing one instrument for each song – you play all four. Simultaneously.

To prevent your brain exploding as you try to work out how that's possible, I'll elaborate. Each instrument has a separate note chart, and at the beginning of a song, only one instrument will have notes scrolling towards you. You play phrases – short, five to ten second segments of the song - and completing a phrase “locks” that instrument for a little while, and opens another for play. If you don't get 100% accuracy on a phrase, then the instrument remains open, and you're going to have to do another phrase to lock it off. Meanwhile, other instruments will be periodically opening up.

If you're doing well, then you've only ever got one instrument open at a time, and you're hopping back and forth between them with the PSP's shoulder buttons. If you continually mess up on, say, a particularly hard guitar riff, then you're going to have note charts scrolling for other instruments, with their health continuously dropping. It takes awhile for an instrument to fail out, thankfully, but on a faster, more hectic song it can be a continuous threat as you desperately trying to lock off an instrument or two, just to stay afloat.
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What's surprising (other than Harmonix making the “squeeze out a Cleveland Steamer” part of Tenacious D's Rock Your Socks a vocal solo rather than censoring it) is that the gameplay not only works, but works well, and feels markedly different to Rock Band. The real fear many have - the lack of a tangible connection to the music through mimicking a musician on your plastic instrument – has been addressed in a number of particularly subtle ways. The most major is that whichever instrument you're playing has the volume heightened slightly, so that if you switch from vocals to bass, the bass gets louder and you can hear it far more clearly. The other way, obviously, is that Harmonix's note charts are as superb as they ever have been, and feel about as close to playing real music as you can expect from a game which involves pressing face buttons to a rhythm.

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