Green Day Rockband – Review – Xbox 360

“My eyes feel like there gonna bleed” “The subliminal mindfuck America” “I am one of those, melodramatic fools” “Warning: Live without warning” “It´s something unpredictable, but in the end is right”, the lyrics are etched into everyone’s mind. Growing up in the 80′s and 90′s, I remember blaring the tunes, singing along.  20 years later they still are growing strong.  Harmonix tried its best to follow up their last game with this one.
Story: there is absolutely no story line to the game, you have a setlist of 4 to start your career, and as you complete songs, more songs are unlocked.  You are given 3 venues, “The Warehouse” “Milton Keynes”, and “Fox Theatre Oakland”

Gameplay: Like most Rhythm/music games you are given the choice of what instrument you want to play. Among them are the Guitar, Drums, Vocals, and bass guitar. You are also given the choice of difficulty. Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert to choose from.  When you start the song, you will see that there are squares moving vertical, from top to bottom. You hit the button as it passes through the same colored circle at the bottom to score points. More points mean higher star rating, up to 5.  After the song you will see your score and what you unlocked if you did well. If you scored at least 3 stars you will unlock a picture of the band, 5 you will unlock another picture.  As you pass songs you will earn “creds” which will allow you to unlock special challenges like complete a whole set of songs off a certain album. When you complete the challenge, you will recieve a cool movie that you can watch.

Sound/Graphics: There is a setlist of 44 songs from Green Day.  Overall the set list is once again kind of weak, it seems like some of the songs are fillers, though they do have quite a lot of the famous songs such as: American Idiot, Brain Stew, Longview, Boulevard of Broken Dreams,  21 Guns, Warning, Good Riddance (time of your life), Minority, She’s A Rebel, Basket Case, When I Come Around, and Wake Me Up When September Ends.  The graphics seem quite realistic for the time frame.  Most of the concerts that I have been to look pretty much the game portrays.  Given the fact that this is a band-centralized game, the characters are pretty accurate descriptions of Billie Joe, Mike Dirnt, and Tré Cool. Songs are edited as there is some swearing, Movies have visual aids that aren’t censored.

Omissions/Additions: They deleted a few things from past Rockbands. They removed using your Avatar as the person you are playing, they also left out the usage of ending the song the way you wanted. They added changing the sound options to where you can now have Dolby Digital and a bass boost.

Multiplayer: Multiplayer allows you to play 2-4 people together as a band, locally or over the internet. Not much more to say about it, just co-op career mode or quickplay. There’s actually an achievement/trophy that you can get for beating the whole game, as a 4 person band in 12 hours, from “new game” to the credits.

Overall: Great game, few flaws to it. If you ever loved their songs, and who couldn’t, I would recommend it.  Pretty easy going.

Pros:

• familiar songs everyone knows

• nothing really too hard to accomplish

Cons:

• more fillers then famous songs

• no competitive multiplayer

Score: 8.5 out of 10

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