Rock Band Blitz (Video Game Review)

Does anybody really play music games anymore? Apparently developer Harmonix hasn't given up on the genre yet, and so now we've be given Rock Band Blitz, whether we want it or not. Rock Band Blitz does away with the classic Rock Band style of play and allows you to play with your Xbox 360 controller rather than your plastic instruments. Also rather than playing a song in a group of your friends to form the ultimate band, you're left to play solo with no competitive modes to be seen either. Rock Band Blitz does allow you to play any instrument in the band, and in fact, switching between the instruments mid-song is the key to achieving the highest scores in the game, but unfortunately, Rock Band Blitz is a title that quickly runs its course and reminds you why nobody plays these types of games anymore.


In Rock Band Blitz, you play solo across a soundtrack of 25 different songs from various genres, and the game also allows you to play your massive library of songs already downloaded to your hard drive from previous Rock Band titles. Rather than choosing a single to instrument to play just before starting a song or playlist, you'll be automatically flung into the song where all instruments appear on the screen at once. The object isn't to hit every note, but instead, you'll attempt to hit the series of notes on the instrument that will give you the maximum amount of points. You'll also need to pay close attention to each instruments score multipliers--successfully switch between each instrument at the right times and you can eventually increase the overall available multiplier, but if you neglect a single instrument for too long, you'll lose all your work on the instrument and have to build its multiplier up once again. This means multiplayer is completely gone in Rock Band Blitz, and if that wasn't enough of a turn-off, you'll also only be using two buttons to hit the notes on screen which offers a less than entertaining challenge to say the least.

Rock Band Blitz does offer up a cool feature in the form of power-ups. These can be equipped before starting a song and can give you a variety of important boosts including double the points for a given instrument, a sprite that can be chased across the stage for extra points or even an out of control car that helps you rack up additional points. There are three different types of power-ups and you can unlock more after spending more time with Rock Band Blitz. Unfortunately, these are the only really interesting aspects found in the game, so you'll likely give up on the game long before you acquire a lot of the more interesting ones. You can play all of the songs from Rock Band Blitz on Rock Band 3, so you can enjoy 25 new songs for only 1200 Microsoft Points. Not a bad deal if you're looking to increase your Rock Band 3 library with some new songs. However, it's hard to recommend Rock Band Blitz as anything more than that. As a standalone title, Rock Band Blitz is far from a great game and not nearly worth its asking price.

Game Information:
Developer: Harmonix
Publisher: Harmonix
Platforms: Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3 (reviewed)
Release Date: August 29, 2012

Score: 7 out of 10