RockGamer.com invited our member Jaacar to write a story about one of the music games.  Here’s his view on the newly released Rock Revolution.

Well I went against my instincts and picked up a copy of Rock  Revolution yesterday for the xbox 360. I did it for a couple of reasons. First, even though it is mostly covers, there were some pretty good songs on there. For instance “Paralyzer” by Finger Eleven, “Magic Man” by Heart, etc…

Second, it was only $49. Now I realize there are only 41 songs on the disc but I figured if I only enjoyed half of them, it was still pretty much the same price as Rock Band DLC ($2/song).

Here is my quick review:

Things they did wrong:

* 1. The graphics look almost identical to Karaoke Revolution. The animations are pretty sloppy, or just plain wrong (off) at times.

* 2. On drums, the ‘overdrive’ activation is done by hitting the red pad, green pad AND foot pedal all at the same time. Now I’m not sure about you but I find it very difficult to try to coordinate this in a song where the notes are coming at you at least one per second.

* 3. The ‘overdrive’ isn’t really an overdrive at all. It saves up extra ‘power’ so to speak and when you activate it, it adds it back in to your crowd meter. If your crowd meter is full when you activate it, it just adds points to your score (and from my experiments with it, it isn’t very many points, somewhere around 5-10k on expert drums).

The only time it made any sense to activate was when your crowd meter was almost at the very bottom (ie. you are going to fail out any second). This seemed to add the most energy back in to your meter. Any other time seemed a waste to even attempt activating it due to the fact that you will likely break your combo streak doing so.

* 4. All of the songs are covers, no masters. I’ll come back to this afterwards but after being spoiled by Harmonix with Rock Band 1 and 2, some of these covers sound funny (Won’t Get Fooled Again is a good example).

* 5. The fret board scroll straight down instead of on an angle. Now this might just be a preference thing but I thought I would mention it here.

* 6. The fret boards have a low opacity and you can see through them. Normally I’d say this was a good thing but when you have red, yellow, green, blue and orange notes scrolling down your screen and the stage in the background happens to be red, or the character shown at that very moment is wearing a blue jacket or something, it makes it VERY difficult to see these notes sometimes until the very last second.

* 7. The activation section of the fret board is almost at the very bottom of the screen. Again, it’s likely a preference thing, but I find it a bit ‘late’ sometimes. I was just used to the games we’ve already played a ton of (GH/RB) so after a while I got used to where it was and this became less of an issue.

* 8. No vocalist.

Things they did right:

* 1. All the songs are covers. Yes, I know - I put this in the “Things they did wrong” list too. Well it needs to be here as well. Because they are all covers, the licensing is much easier for them to get and in some cases it has paid off. Not to mention that some of these covers are incredible (as good as Fake Steven Tyler - no I’m not kidding). There are about a dozen that I can think of off the top of my head that are so close to the original, you have to really listen to notice they aren’t.

* 2. The fret bars scroll straight down. I know, again another mention in both categories. Have you ever been playing drums (or guitar for that matter) in Rock Band and THOUGHT that the red and green notes were supposed to be hit together only to realize at the last second they weren’t parallel and needed to be played one right after the other? Well I have and on a diagonal scrolling fret board, I sometimes have a hard time seeing them. When they are coming straight down the screen, it’s immediately obvious.

* 3. Different play modes. There is a mode in the game called “Crank It Up”. This mode starts the song out at the difficulty you choose, but ups it twice during the song (about halfway through it moves it up one level, then at about 3/4s of the way through it moves it up again). This makes it quite fun and challenging at the same time. Another mode is called “Poison Notes”. You play along like you normally would but they send down the fretboard these blackened notes that you aren’t supposed to play. I’d call it the “Make sure you are paying attention” mode.

There are a few others, but for those that like a challenge, there is one called “Band Practice”. This mode has you play a section of notes (around 15 for beginner/easy, 20-25 for medium, 30-35 for hard and 40-45 for expert) three times. These notes are an actual section from the song. The kicker is that the third time you play them, you don’t get to see what color they are, you have to remember. You see a line of “? ? ? ? ?” to let you know there is supposed to be a note there, but it’s up to you to remember what it is. Personally I haven’t finished one of these challenges above medium, but my memory sucks. Smiley

* 4. You can select in the options menu (same place you’d calibrate your system) which type of drum kit you have (5 inputs or 7 inputs). If you leave it on the default (7) and play with your Rock Band drums, you’re going to see these other colored notes you can’t hit. I think this being an option you have to set will take away any chance for error in an ‘auto-detecting’ setup like GH:WT is supposed to have.

* 5. Beginner mode. My girlfriend isn’t very good at drums but likes to try. She doesn’t seem to have much problem with the pads themselves, but the foot pedal is another problem all together. I’m sure she isn’t the only one out there. Beginner mode (and easy mode for that matter) has no foot pedal. None whatsoever. And in Beginner mode, you only have the red and green pads, easy mode you add the yellow in to that mix. She can actually play drums for a couple of difficulty levels, which she likes. Not only that, but when she did venture in to Medium, there wasn’t ALOT of foot pedal so she could actually play the first few songs and finish them without failing out miserably.

* 6. All notes are the same if you miss them. No more ‘red and bass pedal count more’.

* 7. The charting up to Hard is quite consistent. You aren’t going to play a section of a song and find it  mapped one way, then later on in the song play the same riff or drum section only to find it mapped totally different.

* 8. No vocalist (I can’t sing!)

Now there are a few other features that I played around with a bit. The song training mode is identical to Rock Band, where you can select the section you want to practice as well as the speed it comes at.

I played a bit with the music creator. I personally won’t use it very much, but I’m not a musician. It seems pretty well done, there are 8 tracks you can record on so you could lay down only the bass drum on one track then go back and play the hi-hat/snare combo while listening to it playback on another track and then set down some guitar riffs on a third track.

There is also a ‘quick song’ generator that has a few built in drum beats and common guitar riffs you can throw in there. If this is your type of thing, you could probably have a lot of fun with it. And yes, you can save the songs (didn’t seem to be any limit to the number you could save except for your hard drive space).

Overall opinion:
If you are a fan of rhythm games and play guitar and/or drums AND you like the track list, by all means pick it up. It’s a bit of a different format than Rock Band (their solo tour is actually you making records, then playing in a large venue, making more records, a bigger venue, etc…), the challenges are quite fun to play and for a game filled with ‘covers’, I’ve only found one song I personally didn’t like (Won’t Get Fooled Again) and that was only because I have been spoiled by the original. Hell the guy they have singing Metallica sings a hundred percent better than James on the current album they put out (well thats my opinion anyways).

They say they will have weekly DLC for it (none available as of writing this) so if they deliver on that promise at a reasonable price, it will be a good addition to your music game collection. This also (due to licensing issues/difficulties) might be the only place to get some of these songs.

Track List:
1. All My Life by Foo Fighters
2. All the Small Things by Blink-182
3. Am I Evil? by Metallica
4. Are You Gonna Be My Girl by Jet
5. Bad Reputation by Joan Jett
6. Blitzkrieg Bop by Ramones
7. Chop Suey! by System of a Down
8. Cum on Feel the Noize by Quiet Riot
9. Dance, Dance by Fall Out Boy
10. Detroit Rock City by Kiss
11. Diary of Jane by Breaking Benjamin
12. Dirty Little Secret by All-American Rejects
13. Dr. Feelgood by Mötley Crüe
14. The End of Heartache by Killswitch Engage
15. Falling Away from Me by Korn
16. Given Up by Linkin Park
17. Heading Out to the Highway by Judas Priest
18. Highway Star by Deep Purple
19. Holy Wars… The Punishment Due by Megadeth
20. Joker & the Thief by Wolfmother
21. Kiss Me Deadly by Lita Ford
22. Last Resort by Papa Roach
23. Magic Man by Heart
24. No One Like You by Scorpions
25. Our Truth by Lacuna Coil
26. Pain by Three Days Grace
27. Paralyzer by Finger Eleven
28. Pull Me Under by Dream Theater
29. Round and Round by Ratt
30. Run to the Hills by Iron Maiden
31. Sk8er Boi by Avril Lavigne
32. Somebody Told Me by The Killers
33. Spoonman by Soundgarden
34. The Spirit of Radio by Rush
35. Still of the Night by Whitesnake
36. Stone Cold Crazy by Queen
37. Walk by Pantera
38. We’re Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister
39. White Room by Cream
40. Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who
41. Youth Gone Wild by Skid Row