Anybody giving this game above an 8 is either a casual rhythm game player or needs to read this review now.
Nearly every feature in this game is broken.
No score duel. No battle of the bands. World tour is replace by road challenges and challenges from RB2 are replaced by preselected playlists.
No breakneck speed in practice mode.
No option for one player to have breakneck speed and another person not have it for local. If turned on, it affects all players locally.
No option to adjust the speed of breakneck. Drums are still incredibly fast.
Gold stars are broken. There is a new formula for expert gold stars, solo play now have unison bonuses making drums far too easy compared to past RockBand games. Unison bonus are incorporated into past DLC songs so if you 100% a song on RB2 with a perfect overdrive path, someone on RB3 with regular path and 99% will have a higher score. Diminishing all past accomplishments into wasted effort. Solo scores are now recorded even during band quickplay so solo gold stars can also be acquired there. However I have confirmed that the gold star cut off for the recorded solo score during band quickplay is significantly lower and is saved as golding it in solo mode which is basically a non deserved gold star. EXAMPLE: I play Crazy Train on expert guitar during band quickplay with another drummer and bassist and perform decently. The post stat screen says I scored 160,000 for a solo score along with 5 gold stars. I later chose the song in solo quickplay where it says I have 5 gold stars, I play the song and perform great getting a score of 200,000 and it's only 5 stars, no gold. 40k more score, and yet it is recorded as my high score as well 5 gold stars from my previous lower solo score from band quickplay.
Leaderboards are broken. Instead of ranks you more than likely get percents. There is so much information and different ways to sort your songs which is a positive thing but when it comes to score you have to wait at least 5 seconds on each song and look for the score to flash on the right, when I was offline and not connected to rockband central I couldn't even view my scores. It would not blink. When comparing with friends, you can only see score and not ranks. It's the only competitive aspect they have left with tons of different leaderboard options and it's such a horrible mess. I've done songs and it tells me i'm in the top 0% on the leaderboards!..
Literally every feature is broken. Before you play a song and choose the instrument you want to play it will show you the difficulty for each instrument but if you are in a playlist.. it only shows the difficulty of the first song only. It just completely negates the reason to implement that. EXAMPLE: You are doing a preselected playlist during a road tour challenge and there are a number of songs there you didn't select and see the difficulties for. Even the stand ins for your band, you can chose who is in your band and put created characters in it but you can't assign them instruments. They switch at "random" or basically if you have a girl she is always going to be the singer with female vocals and one other guy will be the male singer always. Those aren't major problems but there can almost always be a noticeable improvement when viewing something new in this game. It's like they didn't even play it. There is a stat screen finally showing where you missed in what section but.. it doesn't tell you how many notes total and missed. Like I KNOW where I missed, most of the times its going to be in the solo but we would like to know how many so we can be confident in saying "oh i had -1 or 2" instead of guessing before.
Honestly I can continue. Seriously everything. There isn't really any modes in this game. Quick play and road challenges aside from tutorial and practice which guitar has non. There are a few new things in RB3 charts like hammeron chords in RB2. Some kind of trill and strum thing that isn't explained anywhere, not even in the manual. Pretty much everything isn't explained but after trial and error you should eventually figure it out. Best way is to go to outside sources, look online or ask other people playing the game. I'm not that lazy but still, it's not convenient.
The setlist is far too easy. One of the easiest and least recognizable out of all guitar rhythm games, seriously Rock Revolution has a better setlist (go check it out, only good thing about that game although they are all covers rofl!)They give a new meaning to the word impossible based on their tier ranking system. I'm not exactly complaining about the music, but this is a video game. There is a few tough songs but it is few while the rest of the game is easy. I play all the instruments, mainly guitar and drums which can speak for the majority. Pro Keys is cool too but most of the songs are very scarce with keyboard and this is hand select disc songs. I wonder where the replay value is in the DLC. I've seen the Pro Guitar leaderboards and there was less than 200 people on it as of this review. Pro Drums doesn't offer new lanes on the note chart but a circle figure instead of a rectangle, the cymbals are above the toms, makes you feel more of a drummer and develops some muscle memory but the challenge or difficulty is hardly affected.
Wow hey, I'm still going? I'm not voicing opinion here guys, I'm pointing out legit problems in this game. I love RockBand but they need to make this game for us, for everybody and apparently they haven't listened or taken suggestions. Road Challenges, the main new mode for this game. If you are doing solo you will find that this isn't a challenge at all, and I'm not talking about difficulty although of course it is a breeze. EXAMPLE of challenges: Hold Streak for as long as you can. Keep a 4x multiplier as long as you can. Keep up good accuracy. Don't miss while your overdrive is activated. HEY if you havn't gotten by now basically all it is saying is, DONT MESS UP! Which they must think we are that dumb to pass these off as being different and innovative. Trust me, it's better to do these with a friend or a band although no score is shown for some reason as well as your solo percentages. When do you play to purposely miss notes, this challenge mode boggles my mind. Just play your best and you will do well on 90% of the challenges without even reading them. The only one I found to be any different was to deploy overdrive when you are full as many times as you can.
Quickplay veto options, if you pick a song and someone doesn't like it they can delete. If you delete a song someone wants to play, they almost always leave. Maybe there should be a majority vote thing or like some better communication between players. Maybe if someone pushes right on the d-pad it can say Too Hard, or left meaning Too Easy, or up saying Dibs on Guitar since most players don't use mics during play.
I have over 400 DLC songs and since RB2 had been out so long I've spent a lot of time getting some impressive scores and gold stars across multiple instruments. So not only is the scoring system different in RB3 which I guess makes it's completely different now but there is no way to keep my recorded scores. It is all now unplayed in RB3. Everyone's "best run"s and "never gunna be able to do that again" is wiped clear.
I love Rock Band, and I'll continue to play RB3 but I wish they would fix the features we loved and had some better game testers. I know this game is for everyone but sometimes you wonder how every demonstration they put on is by people who aren't very good at the game. Rock Band has always had really good potential and there are some very good things in this game like it's overall presentation with it's art style, menu's, the FEATURES they have are all great ideas but weren't polished well, rather just came in quantity. They had time on their hands so there is not much excuse but I believe the production on the PRO modes really took most of their time. It's so clearly obvious that the pro guitar and maybe along with the other pro modes, should have been its own game. Rock Band Pro. I don't think we were ever asking to learn to play real guitar through a video game. Seems like they made the game as a response to the media question, why not play a real guitar? That question never affected us, we know we are playing a video game for fun. Sadly, the pro guitar out now is a fake "real" guitar with a 100 plastic buttons (string version coming out eventually). It's just unfortunate they have not taken the time to truely master and polish the beautiful core gameplay they have created. Rhythm games are dying, you can read all about it in other articles. Maybe harmonix was trying to revive it, but during this effort failed on the basics.
Love, games, life. TRUTH.