Well, the idea of Rock Band without instruments pretty much put this off of my radar completely. The demo coming surprised me, so I took a gander.

Can a dumbed-down version without instruments still be any good? Well, you might be surprised by the answer!

Read on!

What is in the demo?
You have 2 things. A tutorial, to get the basics of the game. And you have quickplay, which let’s you play one of 3 songs.  There’s Miss Murder by AFI, The Middle by Jimmy Eat World and Everlong by Foo Fighters. Each of those can be played at any difficulty. Oh, and each of those songs you only get to play about 50% of them.

There’s obviously not a whole lot of content, but it IS a demo… But why couldn’t they include full songs instead of just half songs? It’s the first time I play a rhythm game demo that does this. But still, it’s good enough to give you a good feel of what the final game will be like.

How is it?
Well, I was actually surprised. The lack of instruments to play is a downer at first, but the gameplay is actually pretty solid. Here’s how it works.
Each instrument only has four notes: Red, Yellow, Green and Blue. You press Left for Red, Up for Yellow, Triangle for Green and Circle for Blue (vocals also work with button presses). You play all the instruments. Kinda. You start on an instrument, then you when you complete a “phrase”(a series of notes), or a solo, the instrument plays itself for a while. So when you’re done with a phrase, you can press L or R to go to another instrument that needs playing. If you screw up a phrase the instrument makes you do the next phrase until you can get it, and you can switch anytime to another instrument. If you screw up too much with an instrument, it fails and you slowly start losing the whole song. There’s white notes, which give you overdrive power when you get a series of them, and pressing X or Down brings you in overdrive (on all the instruments). It boosts your multiplier and revives all failed instruments.

It definitely takes some practice, and it gets a lot harder on higher difficulties. And it’s actually pretty fun to play.

Hype meter
The hype meter is not very high on this end. The game is definitely better than I was expecting, that’s for sure, and when I see it at a low price I will go and pick it up.

The problem is that the song list is a bit disappointing. Not because it’s bad, it actually has quite a few good/great songs, but it mostly features songs from Rock Band 1 and 2. Here it is:

* AFI – “Miss Murder”
* All-American Rejects – “Move Along”
* Audioslave – “Gasoline”
* Black Tide – “Show Me the Way”
* Freezepop – “Less Talk More Rokk”
* Jimmy Eat World – “The Middle”
* The Killers – “Mr. Brightside”
* Lacuna Coil – “Our Truth”
* Lamb of God – “Laid to Rest”
* Modest Mouse – “Float On”
* Queens of the Stone Age – “3′s and 7′s”
* System of a Down – “Chop Suey!”
* Tenacious D – “Rock Your Socks”

* Boston – “More Than a Feeling”
* Jackson 5 – “ABC” .
* Jethro Tull – “Aqualung”
* Kansas – “Carry on Wayward Son
* Rush – “The Trees”

* The Who – “Pinball Wizard”

There’s also some confirmed DLC, and probably more on the way.

Overall, this should be a pretty fun game, but the unoriginal song list is a bit disheartening.

jobocan demo, Games, Handheld, impressions, Preview, psp