And so we have another one of these band centric music rhythm games, this time following Green Day. And while these games seem to offer a “more of the same” type feel to them, they’re always worth a bash to see if anything new has been unearthed that could possibly make its way onto Rock Band 3.
So what do we have, 47 Green Day tracks spanning their career from Dookie in 1994 up to 21st Century Breakdown in 2009. With two full albums, Dookie and American Idiot and the vast majority of 21st Century Breakdown ( the remaining songs already available as DLC before release ). You play as Green Day in three separate venues The Warehouse, a fictional venue reminiscent of their early performances, Milton Keynes, following from their “Bullet in a Bible” concert movie, and The Fox Theatre, Oakland, where Green Day performed for the release of 21st Century Breakdown. Within these three venues, the set list is broken down into three separate parts where the first part must be completed before moving onto the second part etc. However, unlike most other band centric releases, you can start out at any of these three gigs.
There’s no real need to go into details about how the game plays, because if you don’t know how the music rhythm genre works at this stage, where have you been living? But what I did enjoy about the gigs themselves is the way the band interacted with the audience, the animations where in sync with the music, and the crowds reactions did change with the tempo of the music. Gone are the images of the bass player strumming away, even though there is no bass being played at that particular section of the song. This move away from copy and paste animations, was certainly a welcome addition.
The songs themselves are actually really fun to play, being honest, I don’t know a lot of Green Day material, besides from what I’d heard on the radio, but I was pleasantly surprised at just how well their tracks transfer to this medium. A lot where short and punchy songs, with a nice flow to the guitar rhythm making scoring a nice streak very attainable. While others where just manic and a real challenge to keep pace with.
Playing through, what you could consider to be the career you unlock photos and videos, depending on how well you perform in each track. While some of these photos are something that only true fans will enjoy, the videos offer a great look into the life of Green Day as their career progressed through the years. Performing well in each track also allows you to unlock challenges for each of the three venues, with set objectives like “scoring a minimum of 18 stars for a series of 4 songs” etc. These add replayability and certainly extend the lifetime of the game. But what this did show up, is one of my main gripes with Green Day: Rock Band.
Loading up the career, you choose one of three venues and then start your list of four to five songs. After each song, you are bumped out to the song selection menu where you choose the next song on the list and then continue. This really annoyed me, a lot of loading screens and needless waiting around. I’ve chosen to do the career so let me do a selection of songs in a row, if I wanted to play single songs, I’d select “quick play”. But my frustration was compounded when I played a few of the challenges, these have the quick load system in place, meaning that once a challenge is selected you run through your set without being bumped back out to a menu until its finished. Why o why, would you have the feature in one section of the game, and not the other? The mind boggles.
Having said that, I did enjoy my time with Green Day: Rock Band, and as always Rock Band has widened my musical taste. If you’re a fan of Green Day, this is a no-brainer purchase, if your an existing fan of the Rock Band franchise, you can export all the on disc tracks to your existing library making it a nice release for your collection, however, if you new to the music rhythm genre, try out Rock Band 2 of Guitar Hero 5 first.
8/10
Review by Brian Buckley
