Review | Green Day Rockband
Green Day: Rock Band is the fifth major release in the Rock Band series. The game’s setlist consists of songs by the popular punk rock group Green Day spanning over 15 years of their career and is portrayed with virtual depictions of the three band members performing the songs in new venues designed specifically for the game.
I always find reviewing music titles a difficult experience as one is only as good as the artist/s or of course more relevantly your own personal preference. I mean seriously its Green Day and Rock Band, you either like the combination or not. So I thought the best way to add input was to initially investigate the actual game mechanics rather than the songlist. As you would expect the game generally has the same look and feel as any other game in the series.
For those of you new to Rock Band, you need to successfully hit the proper notes in sequence to earn points for each player and boost your “performance meter”. If a player fails to match the notes, their performance meter drops. If the meter empties, that player is forced to drop out of play, temporarily silencing that instrument and causing the band’s overall performance to drop. Any player to drop out can be “saved” if another player activates “Overdrive”, by successfully completing specially-marked phrases, and for guitar and bass players, using the controller’s whammy bar to alter the pitch of marked sustained notes.
The game also supports ‘harmonies’ as introduced in The Beatles: Rock Band, allowing multiple singers to perform the vocal portion. The difficulty level (ranging from “Easy” to “Expert”) includes a “No Fail” mode which has been carried over from Rock Band 2 and is accessible from the difficulty selection screen rather than from the game’s main menu. This mode allows players to complete songs regardless of their performance. In addition, No Fail mode is automatically enabled for any player who chooses the “Easy” difficulty. But what surprised me were the actual differences in play with the levels. I found Medium offered a true challenge, yet easy on some of the songs was insanely simple; in some cases there was nothing to do for over half the track, not even a simple beat as seen with other titles.
One feature I did like was the ability to identify and change players’ handedness (great for you lefties out there) for guitar, bass, or drums before the start of or during a song via the game’s “pause” menu. Green Day: Rock Band also features a Career mode similar to The Beatles: Rock Band, however, it allows the player to immediately select any of the available songs and records to play from the start instead of stepping through specific sets. The Career mode has a “meta-game” through various challenges that subsequently unlock additional rewards (photographs or videos contained on disc), such as by completing every song in a specific set with a 4-star rating or better.
Now I want to talk about the song content itself. Paul DeGooyer, senior Vice President of MTV Games, stated that Green Day was selected as the next band due to input from fans, and claimed that Green Day’s music lends itself well to the format, as the music is both “fun to play” and also covers a range of genres from the band’s early days in punk rock to their modern, alternative-based works. MTV Games president Scott Guthrie believed that Green Day would have a larger awareness for their target market (16 to 34-year old males) than The Beatles, and expected to see better sales as a result. Personally I felt that the songs were a little too similar for my liking over other titles that offered compilations, saying that, there is some truth to what both Paul and Scott have said, but really it all comes down to personal choice. I did enjoy The Beatles more than Green Day but to be honest the compilation titles such as RB2, RB3 or even RB Lego has had more game time in my household.
The game features 47 tracks spanning the band’s career, including two full albums; Dookie and American Idiot and twelve out of eighteen tracks from 21st Century Breakdown. Note that the tracks are actually edited (no f-bombs) which seems a little odd given the intended target audience.
All in all Green Day offers some great music and is supported with the best game features the series has offered, but to me it was a little mundane. The venues and character models seemed light compared to that of the more polished Beatles title, and the difficulty level disparities in the game mechanics were odd. However when it comes down to it, if you like Green Day and Rock Band it’s a no brainer; but ultimately the choice is yours. [7]
