It’s hard to see where Harmonix would take their smash-hit Rock Band series next considering they’ve turned living rooms across the country into cheap recording studios. (Insert a joke about what bizarre instrument they could add next here), but the music loving company is taking a much simpler approach to their next title; Rock Band Blitz.
Rock Band Blitz is an arcadey departure from the franchises rock-star simulator presentation. Rather than being forced to train for hours on end with plastic instruments in a bid to not look like a moron and be the future hermit of your friends, you’ll be aiming to become the worlds greatest one man band, juggling all four instruments at the same time.
How on earth does this occur? Well, put your Fischer Price instruments away, this is an entirely controller based fare. Rock Band Blitz looks like it will play much like Harmonix’s original music thrashing attempts Frequency and Amplitude. In these games, you travelled down a musical road, with each instrument representing a different pathway littered with notes. Take to the drums and bash buttons at the right time and you permanently earned the drum track of your selected song, and so you continued having to build up each track element by element. It sounds almost stupidly simplistic, but these games were oddly compelling at the time, and strangely rewarding as you gradually added layers of instruments on top of each other to create a song almost from scratch. A variety of wacky power-ups are also promised to liven things up, with a mysterious pinball confirmed and from the look of the logo, a rocket, a bomb and…a tire to follow.
Although it looks like a nice little stand-alone title, it’s looking to blend in with its older siblings as well as possible. Rock Band’s exceptionally vast back-catalogue of over 3700 songs will be playable, and so for veterans of the series this could be a much bigger game than previously thought. Should your electronic record collection be ridiculously scarce however, the game comes bundled with 25 extra songs that can be played across all Rock Band games, plus a recommendation system that may lead you to a bunch of downloadable tracks you’ll want to have a look into.
It may be something of a departure for Rock Band, but it’s not alien territory for Harmonix and should provide some swell bitesize bliss. Expect Rock Band Blitz to rock out on the Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network this summer.