For those of you who don't know what the game is (as I would imagine there is quite a few) here's a basic rundown. The game was released by Konami, and came out for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii, and Nintendo DS. Now, Konami STARTED the whole guitar in a game thing with GuitarFreaks and DrumMania. Harmonix just simply copied off the formula, improved it and added some extra buttons and behold, we have Guitar Hero.



Rock Revolution, at least for the 360 and PS3 (don't know, nor do I particularly care about the Wii version) plays identical to Rock Band, except it doesn't have vocals support. There's one strike against it. When you bought the bundle, it didn't come with a guitar. Just the game and a drum kit. Now this strikes me as odd, because it was made to compete with Guitar Hero and Rock Band ... and it doesn't have vocals support. And it doesn't come with the guitar. It IS compatible with the guitar controllers from the other games though. But if you have the other games, you probably aren't going to pick this up. I've read that the drum kit is oddly laid out, but I don't have it so I can't really say anything about it. Although it is only about 40 bucks on Amazon, so maybe I'll pick it up for the hell of it.



Now why they would they release a party game like that without support for the vocals and no guitar is beyond me. Stupidity probably. Now let's get into the game itself. The game itself consists of 41 tracks ranging from songs by the Foo Fighters to Pantera, Metallica, Soundgarden, etc etc, and all but two of those tracks I believe are covers. "Paralyzer" by Finger Eleven and "Given Up" by Linkin Park. Now the quality of the covers mainly ranges (It's weird as hell to me to hear a KoRn song without Johnathan Davis singing, let me tell ya) from just outright bad, such as the aforementioned KoRn cover to decent. I actually thought the cover of Spoonman by Soundgarden was pretty good.



Graphically, no it's not as good as Rock Band, but they get the job done well enough. But there aren't any character customization options. What you see is what you get. But they didn't decide to adopt the familiar Guitar Hero and Rock Band note lane. Instead of leaning towards you on the screen, which is in my opinion the optimal way for it to be done on a console version of a game like this, the note lane goes straight up and down on the left of the screen. And it's slightly transparent, which, with all the lights and whatnot and movement going on in the background, not to mention the notes themselves are quite small and lacking in detail it makes it a pain in the ass to see what's coming sometimes. You REALLY have to try to ignore what's going on in the background.

And the gameplay, while it is decent once you get used to the way the note lane is handled is actually pretty good. The note layouts for the songs, while not perfect, are pretty good. I can only comment on the guitar because I don't have the drum kit, but it plays exactly how you would expect. The hammer-ons and pull-offs and whatnot are there and work fine, it's got whatever it's version of Star Power is along with a note that shows up as a solid line, once you hit it you have to keep strumming to keep the note.

The career mode for it is totally bare bones. You're a band, you play shows. That's literally it. Obviously you can play the game with your friends. And there is a small amount of downloadable content for it (at least here
is on Xbox Live, I don't know about the PS3). Mostly Pantera songs though, and being that I'm not a big Pantera fan, I could honestly care less. There's a recording studio where you can make your own tracks. BUT you can't play them in the game OR share them with friends. So what the hell was the point?

All in all, there's no reason whatsoever to buy Rock Revolution, even though it ultimately IS a halfway decent game for the money. Rock Band and Guitar Hero have all if not most of the songs in this game, that AREN'T covers, and overall does EVERYTHING better.

Now for the Nintendo DS version.



I bought a Nintendo DS Lite the other day (yeah yeuah yeah, I know that the DSi is out, but I'm poor.) and a bunch of games with it. Some obvious ones like New Super Mario Bros and Final Fantasy III, as well as a few others from pawn shops and whatnot. And then one of the ones I got was the DS version of Rock Revolution.

There is NOTHING about this version of the game that is anywhere NEAR worth it. There are 20 songs in it, ALL covers I do believe. Now in my opinion, that's not a big deal. But the sound quality itself is HORRENDOUS. Somehow, they got a band to cover the guitar and the drums. But not the bass guitar. The bass guitar is much louder than all the rest of the instruments and sounds like it was done on a 5 year old kid's keyboard from Dollar General. Good Lord I'm glad there aren't any Tool songs on this.

Graphically, this game barely qualifies as HAVING graphics. You have a band up on the top screen that barely moves, doesn't even move in time with the music, and is just a couple of still images looping over and over again as the animation. When the singer sings, it looks like he or she is having a seizure. There is nothing that even comes CLOSE to good about the graphical presentation of this game. I think a toddler on crack could come up with a better art style than this. You have male and female versions of each member of the band you can pick, but they all look like they're stoned or on crack. Oh God I think I'm gonna puke.


They can't possibly be serious.

Gameplay ... it's hard for me to tell because I've mainly been playing the guitar on it. You have a guitar in the middle of the screen with a circle around where you would normally strum a real guitar. Then either a down arrow, an up arrow, an icon telling you to tap the screen, or an icon telling you to draw a circle comes down and you do one of those things when the icon gets into the circle. Yes, I know I'm not good at describing this. My experience with DS games is limited. The drums, you have a drum kit on screen with 7 sections to it. At the top of the touch screen, you have a bar, and icons scroll by and you have to hit corresponding drum piece when it reaches a yellow zone. Which is bloody impossible with one stylus. The bass works similarly, you have 4 bass strings, and an arrow goes along one of the strings pointing either up or down and you slide the stylus either up or down. From what I've been playing on the guitar part, even on the higher difficulties it's either boring as all hell or frustrating as sin. You'd think the drums would be a little more interesting, and while they are ... you're only hitting one drum head at a time rather than 2, 3 or more like it's big brother and more well known cousins. Which isn't the game's fault necessarily seeing as how it's using the DS touch screen. The singing, it doesn't matter what you sing so long as you have the pitch right. Which, I do have to commend the game for having that option. You have powerups in the game, which I'm assuming are used like they are in the other ones. To save your ass. And there is one AWESOME one in the guitar part. When you first hit all the special notes, you get a tone. And a purple guitar pick at the top of the touch screen. But don't hit it just yet! Wait ... be patient. When you hit those special notes 2 more times, you can hit that little purple pick and you are "treated" to a closeup shot of the guitarist you picked taking up both screens while the song is playing. Which means you don't have to play this sorry excuse of a game for a few seconds. You can buy things like pyrotechnics and amps and the like from the in game store, but I haven't bothered with it because quite honestly I don't care.

The only real mode to the game that's out of the ordinary is a media player where you can play songs you've unlocked. WHY anyone would want to subject themselves to this is beyond me.

The 360 and PS3 versions, you can get this game for under 20 bucks at most places. If you've got the money to kill and you're like me and like trying out these different guitar and band type games, go ahead and snag it. But if you're content with Rock Band and Guitar Hero, don't bother. They do everything better. I don't know about the Wii version because I haven't played it and it uses the Wiimote or whatever the hell that thing's called instead of the instruments. But if you see the DS version, do yourself a favor and stay away. FAR FAR away. When I said that Konami started the whole guitar videogame thing earlier, I am aware that they were developed by someone else, and Konami published it. But they should've stepped up their game.

There have been articles right here on Destructoid previously about Rock Revolution, just do a search. You will probably find better written stuff there about it. :) I'm just giving my opinion. I wouldn't have even bothered to write this up if I hadn't have played the train wreck that is the DS version and wanted to save some curious person the trauma that I've gone through. I actually feel like less of a person for having played it. I wanna go to Konami's offices and find the interns who did the DS version and asked them how the hell such a thing could ever see the light of day.