Ok I’ve had a full week with Rock Band 3. I really love some things but there are some pretty unfortunate limitations Harmonix had to work around to have some features in, which detract from the overall experience. However my experience isn’t the same as everyone else so I’ll be up front about that.

Jump in/drop out anytime is totally excellent. Unlike previous Rock Band games where you have to quit a song or finish it to add someone in, and then drop out all the way back to band creation screen, you can just hit start after you plug in a controller and jump in. However for this cool aspect there is some unfortunate incompleteness to this. It appears other players who jump in can’t pick from my created characters so they’re stuck with default list of characters. Additionally when you jump in/out mid song your score won’t be ranked which makes sense.

The new single player feels a lot better but really short at the same time. I HATED going from city to city with multiple venues all with increasingly large set lists in the older Rock Band games. The new method works a lot better you still travel from set to set with only 2-3 songs to play each in a 3-5 venue run. It gives much greater control as well because you can pick from a predefined set of songs or a randomized list withing a certain criteria (all RB1 songs, only rock songs, etc.) or a set of your choosing also within a criteria. The integration with your downloaded songs is terrific here though, I’ll talk about it later. However it’s much shorter or it feels certainly shorter. Whereas in RB2 you could spend a whole week or two hammering out the world tour, I feel like you can finish the single player in a weekend.

The goals/achievements section is really neat and adds a lot of replay value as some of the challenges will take time to get. One involves nailing over 50,000 hammer-ons/pull-offs. You can check your status on all of them in the unintuitively named career option. In addition the ease of checking your progress versus your friends is so great. After beating a song you get your ranking among the world and your friends pretty quickly. The scoring screen is pretty excellent as well, something that’s been missing since Guitar Hero 2.

The way the game handles drum rolls and trills (alternating quickly from one note to another) is vastly improved. One horrible aspect of playing the stock drum kit is the level of sensitivity you have to adjust to when playing very rapid notes in succession. It becomes completely unrealistic when you have a drum roll section. However the new setup makes those sections really bold highlights around the note and you can just do a drum roll/trill much more  naturally without fighting the controllers. Your goal isn’t to hit every single bar that flies down the lane, but just do a drum roll. I sort of wish they could retroactively adjust this with the older songs.

The set list actually I feel is a lot weaker with this game. After 2000+ songs in the catalog I guess it gets harder to put together a great batch of songs. Some tracks are so great. But whereas in other Rock Band games I’ll play a song I’ve never heard of and really be surprised at how much I like it, that happened far less frequently in RB3 but I haven’t played all the songs yet. On the plus side I have 405 songs imported/downloaded so I don’t have to stick strictly to the RB3 tracks. Also they let you rate songs and the higher you rate songs the more frequently they show up in random set lists which is a great touch.

I picked up the keyboard instrument and I have to say, it’s tough. Where with the guitar controller I know where all my fingers are relative to the buttons, it’s much different on pro keys. So much of my time is spent looking up and down that I realize what’s most likely playing at expert pro level is that you have the song more or less memorized. I suspect the same will be true for pro guitar as well. This is a much more daunting idea to tackle. When I play with friends my dream is to eventually get them all up on expert level of the regular game. However after 2 years they’re between medium and hard (we just don’t play enough) so to bring in all pro mode instruments (which would cost a billion dollars) probably is out of scope of reality. Regular keys are pretty fun though and still very challenging even though you can have all 5 fingers on all the keys at once.

Ok time to highlight a huge gripe I have with the game which isn’t actually the fault of Harmonix, or maybe it is. The Xbox can only have 4 controllers plugged in, but the game advertises 7 players at once. 3 vocalists (one controller), 1 drummer, 2 guitar players, 1 keyboard player can all play at once, but only in a special mode called All Instrument Mode. This mode does a tricky thing and kicks you offline, doesn’t track your score, and puts the vocalist up top on karaoke mode whose score doesn’t affect the band and isn’t calculated. For people playing for fun, this isn’t a big deal, but I actually do play for score as well and when one instrument is gutted out it kind of sucks. We were playing last week and the vocalists were bummed that they don’t even have a score display so they can’t even see how well/poorly they did post-song.

The other thing that sucks about All Instrument Mode is that it is required even if you want this combination of players: 2 guitars, 1 drummer, 1 keyboard. If you want to avoid the scoreless mode you have to drop either 1 guitar or the keyboard. This restriction makes no sense to me and hopefully it’s patched to fix.

Now, while it’s great they added drop in/drop out anytime one annoying thing occurs, more so for me with 405 tracks than someone playing just Rock Band 3, when playing with a keyboard player and the song lacks a keyboard part, they tend to have to drop out frequently. They were nice actually and allow the keyboard to play the guitar or bass part if a song lacks a key part BUT the game limits instruments to one instrument per part. So if you already have a guitar and bass player the keyboard is forced to sit out. Guitar Hero added in multi-instrument parts so this seems really crummy to have to force someone out. Here’s hoping for this to be added in RB4 (or hopefully via patch!).

So overall, I think if you play Rock Band as a party game and couldn’t care less about score, the game is excellent. The features they’ve added are incredible. If you play like me and care about getting as many people into the game as possible and maxing out your score, you might be kind of sad as it’s a mixed bag. How much you love the whole set list may affect your level of enjoyability. I still love the game but to me it’s B quality only due to the oversights. If they can fix some of this stuff then yes, this is the hallmark of Rock Band games or even all of the music games. I imagine by the time Rock Band 4 hits that we’ll have a totally excellent game and we’ll have these issues hammered out.