The Beatles: Rock Band (Xbox 360) > Reviews (4)

So, doubtless looking for new ways to wring money out of their back catalogue, The Beatles have licensed some of their songs to Rock Band. In order to maximise everyone’s profits, an entirely new game had to be developed – a prettier version of Rock Band 2 with extra bits, some limitations, and only 45 songs.

The game is played in the same way as usual Rock Band games – you either play guitar or bass (using a guitar-shaped controller); drums (using a plastic drum kit); or you sing (using a microphone). You play or sing along to what appears on the screen, ultimately being judged on how well your performance matches the original track. Rock Band, once you embrace the fundamental silliness of it, remains the best party game around. You can also play online, either competitively or as part of a band, which works fine.

The only new functionality is the introduction of harmony vocals. This, of course, requires buying new microphones, and is actually quite difficult, especially if you’re trying to do the ‘yeah yeah yeah’ bits while also playing a guitar. There are a few little tweaks to other aspects of the gameplay, which slightly improve what is already a very well made game.

However, it has limited a few other things. It’s obviously been decided that the songs are sacrosanct, so waggling the handle thingie on a guitar no longer bends notes, and the wah-wah and similar effects aren’t available. This is annoying – if you’re going to release songs in what is effectively a glorified karaoke format, there’s no point wrapping them in cellophane. It’s similarly irritating that the game isn’t compatible with other Rock Band games, so you’ll never be able to play the songs with characters you’ve created, or mingle set lists with Bon Jovi or Billy Idol. The Beatles are iconic, but this tendency to see them as somehow separate from the rest of popular music, like they’re a National Trust property or something, is frustrating.

Still, perhaps to make up for removing the ability to make your own characters, a lot of effort has gone into the visuals of the game. It looks amazing – the design is extraordinarily impressive. It’s not pretentious, it doesn’t overwhelm the game, but it is lovely and very satisfying. The look and feel of the interface is the same as in regular Rock Band, although it’s a lot more pastel and has a gentler visual vibe. Unfortunately they don’t seem to have taken colour blindness into account when designing it – I find it difficult to spot notes in the ‘red’ track when I go into ‘Beatlemania’ (what used to be called ‘overdrive’ – a bonus you earn by doing well).

The story mode takes you through The Beatles’ career, with authentic looking locations like The Cavern Club and Shea Stadium. Little animated Beatles play the instruments – they’re all pleasantly caricatured in a very gentle way (oddly, they all have really big chins except Ringo). There are occasionally shots of girls screaming in the audience. When they get to the second half of their career – when they’d stopped touring and stuck to the studio – we get ‘dreamscapes’.

The Beatles start playing in the studio, but soon we zoom off into very well-realised psychedelic fantasy lands. The Within You Without You one is particularly good, if kind of distracting when you’re playing.

It’s a shame that it’s so reverential, though. I was kind of hoping we’d get a little Yoko One sitting in the corner during the White Album sessions, eyeballing us like some avant garde version of the ghost from Ring. Plus more drugs and band arguments. And maybe groupies. Yeah, groupies would have been good. And why does the ‘dreamscape’ for Octopus’s Garden not feature an octopus? It seems so obvious...

There are video clips and ‘never before seen’ photos to unlock, and you get little snippets of genuine studio banter at the beginnings and ends of tracks. I think this stuff is intended as a selling point for the really obsessive collectors. It’s nice that it’s there, but I’ve yet to bother to look at all the photos or watch the videos.

Obviously you have to at least vaguely like The Beatles’ music to enjoy this. This is presumably not aimed at children (the game’s visual style doesn’t feel like it’s targeting children). The choice of songs is skewed heavily in favour of the later stuff, which is a lot more varied than the early pop songs. (It’s also harder for them to isolate individual instrument tracks in the earlier songs.) There’s perhaps a bit too much emphasis on songs Ringo sang (I Wanna Be Your Man is no-one’s idea of an essential Beatles track), but I guess they had to keep him happy. It’s odd that popular numbers like Let It Be, She Loves You or Hey Jude are omitted, though. Help! would have been a good one, too, with the harmony vocals and all.

Even though they aren’t your typical Rock Band fare, Harmonix have done a very good job in making the songs into playable tracks. The patterns for each song are impressively different from one another, and they’re a lot more difficult than I imagined they’d be (at least on the higher difficulty levels – lower levels are easy enough to not scare off casual players). The songs have sometimes been truncated, to avoid fade-outs, which will doubtless annoy purists. The only one that I found irritating is that Taxman has had its final guitar solo removed. I Want You (She’s So Heavy) and Hey Bulldog are probably my favourites to play.

The bad thing about the game is how few songs there are – only 45. For the £40 I originally paid, this seems more than a little unreasonable. Downloadable albums are available, but they aren’t cheap (there don’t seem to be any more in the offing). Amazingly, this is the first time The Beatles’ music has been made available for legal download in any format. This is a shame given how readily they jumped on new technology in their recording days. Still, I guess they were younger/alive then. A game with only half the number of tracks as a regular Rock Band game doesn’t make me think any more highly of anyone involved. They’re a bunch of Mean Mr Mustards. They care too much for money.

They’ve gained the world but lost their souls. While they live their life of ease, we wonder how we’ll manage to make ends meet. And so on.

The game disk alone is down to £12 now. You can also buy it with an instrument pack (drum kit, one microphone, one guitar) for £100 from amazon, although the RRP remains £180, three times more than a regular Rock Band set-up. Replicas of guitars used by the band are also available for about £80 each. Luckily it’s compatible with older Rock Band and Guitar Hero controllers.

Although I’m pissed off with the small number of songs and gobsmacked by the price of the full kit, I’m still glad this game exists. There’s not a great deal of 60s music in Rock Band format, and this obviously goes a long way to rectifying that. I just hope that this doesn’t encourage other ‘big name’ bands to also insist on non-compatibility with the main game. Rock Band’s still the best party game in town. The Beatles might want us to feel privileged to be allowed to pay for the right to play their songs; but this is best enjoyed as a chance to drunkenly roar the lyrics to Paperback Writer while your friends accompany you on plastic guitars.