Doug Tabacco

…do do do do do.

So I spent most of Friday and Saturday weekend playing all the way through the story mode of The Beatles: Rock Band and I have to say it’s pretty good stuff. Now I’m already pretty solidly on board with the Rock Band franchise, so it’s not like there was going to be a lot to dislike, gameplay-wise, but still.

The obvious first bullet point is the music. If you want me to explain why the Beatles are good, odds are you won’t be enjoying this game. That said, the game did remind me that I really don’t care all that much for their first album (with the exception of the always fun Twist and Shout).  The game’s a pretty decent Best-of album, though, and it looks like the gaps that do exist will be filled in via DLC.

One thing that I did notice is that the difficulty scale you’re given for each game is definitely adjusted relative to the regular game. Most of the Beatles catalog isn’t technically complex, so a 5/5 difficulty rating on a song doesn’t really map to, say, Tenacious D’s Master Exploder from Rock Band. I found myself getting 100% on the first play-through on a decent number of songs at the Medium setting (usually my preferred balance between ‘fun’ and ‘frustrating’ in these games). I like the music enough though that it really doesn’t bother me at all. Plus, my fingers don’t get tired as quickly.

The first half or so of the story mode does the band-focused music game thing, following them from venue to venue through their career. You get a lot of the cutaways to waaaay overenthusiastic girls screaming during the songs, as you’d expect. But when it hits the point where the band stopped touring, they went a different (and pretty great) direction. The next three groups of songs are just titled “Abbey Road ’66-’67″ and so on. Each song starts in the studio, but as the music builds the studio fades away into song-specific montages (Harmonix has been trying to call them ‘dreamscapes’ but I’m having none of that). And yeah, that includes the guy in the walrus costume for “I am the Walrus”. They’re all nicely done and it’s pretty obvious how much work Harmonix put into making them as special as possible. My one complaint is that if you’re actually playing, it’s sometimes hard to focus on the note tracks when there’s crazy fantastical stuff going on in the background. As an aside, by the way, the cover art for “Magical Mystery Tour” used to creep me out a bit as a kid, and it turns out that it still sort of does to this day.

Anyway, long story short, it’s an enjoyable game. If you’re not into Rock Band, you probably still won’t be into The Beatles: Rock Band.  Vocal Harmonies aside, it’s not really doing anything new, but who cares? It’s the Beatles and it’s fun.